


I Think Therefore I Am

by oschun



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-20
Updated: 2012-07-20
Packaged: 2017-11-10 08:59:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 37,658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/464518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oschun/pseuds/oschun
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean is a privileged member of the dwindling original population of North America that has been decimated by viral outbreaks and low birth <a class="inlineAdmedialink" href="#"></a><a class="inlineAdmedialink" href="#"></a><a class="inlineAdmedialink" href="#"></a><a class="inlineAdmedialink" href="#"></a><a class="inlineAdmedialink" href="#">rates</a>. Human clones have been created to bolster the work force. They are a segregated underclass relegated to the status of soulless drones by their Geneticore creators and by powerful religious groups like the Mothers Union, who consider themselves to be the blessed vessels of God’s greatest creation: the human soul.<br/>This is a story about the complicated relationship between two boys who are forced to grow up into hardened soldiers by a society teetering on the brink of civil war.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Think Therefore I Am

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Big Bang. 
> 
> Thanks to sylvanwitch for her insightful beta skills and to the incredibly talented slinkymilinky for her gorgeous artwork.  
> />
> 
>  
> 
> Title is from Descartes via Blade Runner.  
> Roy: We're not computers, Sebastian. We're physical.  
> Pris: I think, Sebastian, therefore I am.

**The treehouse**

"Did you hear the news?"

“Who hasn’t? Isn’t it terrible?”

"I can't believe the school board allowed it, and after all our lobbying and hard work, to just cave in like that! It's completely disheartening to realize that your voice as a mother counts for nothing."

"Dollars before people, Cathy. That's how this world works."

"Exactly. I always had my reservations about that man as the chair of the school governing board. And the fact that his wife works for Geneticore. It's shameful!"

"I know. His motives for allowing the proposition to pass are questionable, to say the least. He’s hardly neutral, is he?"

"That's exactly what I was saying earlier at the Mothers Union meeting this morning. Didn't I say that, Helen? Weren't those my exact words?"

Dean, who has been impatiently waiting for the talking cluster of his mother's friends to remove their coats in the hallway so he can get past them, starts to irritably kick his soccer ball against the wall.

"Dean, stop doing that! No playing in the house. I’ve told you a hundred times."

One of the cluster—a young, unfamiliar blonde woman—gives a wry smile. "I don't know what you're all so worried about. The presence of the Geneticore kids at the school won't make any difference to Dean and his friends. Life will continue as it always has. If anything, things will be even easier for them. The few minor chores that they're still saddled with—carrying their own books, standing in the lunch queue, taking their own notes in class—will all be covered by the clones."

Dean hasn't really been listening to the conversation but the sudden silence that descends over the hallway sparks his interest.

"Who would like some coffee?" his mother asks with a stiff, too-bright smile, and Dean knows that the young blonde woman with her painted red mouth and quick words won't be invited again. He thinks about smiling at her, admiration for her rebellion making him briefly forget his antipathy towards adults, but she gives him a glance behind the backs of the other women trooping into the living room that stops the impulse in its tracks. It's a look Dean doesn't understand, except he thinks it’s supposed to make him feel ashamed.

It's a feeling that briefly stays with him as he goes out to the garage to get his bike, but Dean's young and not especially sensitive so he forgets about it by the time he gets to the top of the driveway. He's unhampered by the concerns of adults, and adventures are planned for the afternoon.

Making an obvious show of turning left, he double-backs behind the hedge on the other side of the road, ducking low so he won't be seen from the house.

It takes him just under twenty minutes to cycle the deserted road to the biopark, weaving from side to side to avoid the potholes sprouting with grass. He climbs off his bike when the fenced boundary of the park appears ahead of him and wheels it onto the overgrown footpath running adjacent to the road so he can remain hidden behind the line of trees.

The park was abandoned a few of years ago after the second wave viruses broke out. It’s still guarded, but the security is low key, mostly just for show. A division of Geneticore men in black military uniforms comes out once a month on a regular schedule and an old mutant lives permanently in the guard house at the gate. Dean can see him in the distance ambling along the perimeter of the fence in a dignity-mask which covers his head and face like a beekeeper's hood.

Dean’s mom told him there used to be a lot of mutants, just out on the street like regular people, except covered up of course, but now it’s really unusual to see them in public because most of them died or ended up working in the factories with the clones.

When Dean first discovered the abandoned reserve, he used to spend hours shadowing the guard and trying really hard to get a glimpse of his face, imagining all the horrible deformities it was hiding, especially after his stepdad got him a pair of electroencephalogram binoculars for his birthday. But the guard doesn't seem to ever take the hood off, even though there's nobody out here to see him. Dean thinks that’s really weird. Why would you keep yourself covered up all the time like that when there’s nobody to see what you look like?

Nobody but Dean, who eventually grew bored of the long surveillances and imaginary radio communications with his secret troops hidden in the wilds of the biopark: "Be on the alert. Elephant Man is on the move. Over. Any activity on the perimeter? Over. Elephant Man has gone to roost. Over and out."

At fourteen, Dean is too old for imaginary war games, but he’s in a similar situation to the mutant guard: there’s nobody out here to laugh at him.

The guard lost his allure because he never really does anything. He sedately patrols the reserve or he remains unseen in the guardhouse or he tends the vegetable patch next to it. Nobody comes to visit him and he never goes anywhere else. Sometimes he sits up on the roof of the guardhouse reading printed books or watching the sun set. It seems like a very boring life to Dean. But he's still a part of Dean's secret world out here, a peripheral character, the only halfway human one that he can absorb into his games.

The fascination with the mutant guard waned even more after the building of the tree house became his primary preoccupation.

Dean thinks about the tree house all the time, when he’s in class, when he’s having dinner with his mom and step-dad talking across him, when he’s lying in bed at night: the construction difficulties, the glorious promise of it. Most of the day he’s just clock-watching and counting the hours until he can come back out here.

There’s a boy-and-bicycle sized hole in the fence and a narrow metal bridge just after it over a deep ditch that he navigates quickly and with the ease of long practice. He follows the dirt track running alongside the fence until he gets to the rusted metal housing that once held an automatic spray-gun that is his marker for another path into the jungly interior of the park.

He hides his bike under the natural camouflage of a thick ground creeper, turning his face away from the fetid breath emanating from the open mouths of the waxy purple flowers covering it. He hasn’t ever gotten used to that smell of dead, rotting things. He banks on the hope that Elephant Man hasn’t either.

After hiding his bike there’s the usual battle through the dense green wall of plant life to get to the clearing. It’s impossible to create a permanent path because the plants in the biopark are rapidly regenerative, designed to grow back exactly as they were before. It used to be fun, breaking everything, smashing and jumping with impunity, but it doesn’t really count if it’s not real.

Dean pauses when he eventually makes it into the clearing. Every day he thinks his tree house couldn’t be more amazing than the day before, and every day he’s surprised. The wooden boards of the half-built walls hug each other tighter than they did yesterday. In a day or two they will be trying to strangle each other but today they’re still friends. Fat bunches of fluffy pink flowers have burst through the boards overnight. Trailing tangles of tiny, spiky blue orchids hang heavily over their soft pinkness, like a floral, color counterargument. Dean looks up at his creation and smiles in wonder before casting a critical eye over all the new growth, the places where he will have to cut and saw and chop.

He didn’t know that the boards would continue growing or that vines and flowers would creep out of chinks in the wood, competing for the right to live. If he had, he might not have started building the tree house in the first place. But it’s too late to think like that. It’s a competition now: him against the plants and their constant, unnatural growing. And Dean’s stubborn. He’s not going to give up.

He accidentally stumbled on the clearing when he was exploring one day. The biopark scientists must have been experimenting with using the timber for construction. It took a while for him to get into the big, rusted metal strongbox filled with tools, but curiosity and perseverance eventually won out. The pile of flat timber boards stacked up next to the strongbox is held in place by a bendable cage made of copper-colored rods emitting a low, buzzing noise, vibrating on some frequency that seems to prevent the constant growth lying dormant in the wood.

The first time he tried to touch the cage, even with his sleeves pulled protectively over his hands, he got knocked halfway across the clearing on his ass, and he’s been dreaming about little fungal plants growing underneath his fingernails ever since.

But there’s enough space between the rods to reach inside and slide the wooden planks out individually, and he’s better at not getting shocked anymore.

The strongbox contains some individual copper rods, a tempting but daunting source of building material. If he could just activate a couple of them and get them into the joints of the tree house, then maybe he wouldn’t have to work so hard to stop his building project from destroying itself. But he hasn’t been able to figure out how to switch them on, and even if he did, he wouldn’t know how to handle them without electrocuting himself.

Before starting on the tree house, he goes over to the edge of the clearing, where a defensive circle of the buzzing rods holds back the invasion of the plants, so he can check on his animal traps. The first trap gives up two green mice and a vole with swollen gills under its ears. A lot of the animals in the park are sick or mutated. He’s noticed that the mammals seem slightly better off than the reptiles. One of his traps down near the river holds a small green and blue lizard with twinned heads, one half-dead and dragging behind the other. Dean crushes the bad head between his fingers and is repaid with a sharp bite by the ungrateful healthy twin. He stands on the lizard in retribution and the feeling of shame that he felt before comes back to him.

Suddenly irritated, he stalks back up to the clearing and glares up at the tree house. He’s never going to be able to keep up with its constant growing. There’s probably some clever method to building with the wood that the Geneticore scientists thought up, a way to line up the planks so everything grows together organically, but Dean doesn’t know how to do that. He’s only a kid, not a biologist or an engineer. He isn’t even very good at Science. Or at any of his subjects really. It’s a constant disappointment to his mom. The tree house will just carry on growing and twisting and getting all jumbled up until it becomes a monstrosity, a great big mutant tree house.

If his real dad had still been alive, he would have helped Dean build a proper tree house at home. Angry tears well up in Dean’s eyes and a feeling of frustration makes him pick up a rock to throw it at the object of his irritation. The rock goes over the half-built wall and hits something soft-sounding. A shocked, wounded noise comes from inside. Dean startles, but somehow it’s not all that surprising. The tree house is so obviously alive, why wouldn’t it feel pain? Except that the unhappy sound continues and then fades into a very human sounding groan.

For a moment, Dean really still believes the tree house made the noise until he finally accepts the idea that someone is hiding up there. He picks up a bigger rock for protection, scared now. Undecided what to do, he shuffles nervously from foot to foot and cocks his head to listen for any more sounds that might identify the hidden threat. Nothing but the sound of his heartbeat in his ears and the low buzzing hum of the copper rods.

Running away is the obvious choice. Anything could be hiding behind the wall. Maybe it’s the guard, finally caught up with him, or some freakishly mutated, carnivorous, tree-climbing animal lying in wait for him. Dean bites his lip and hesitates, caught between two equally unappealing choices. He doesn’t want to get eaten, obviously, but running away is tantamount to giving up his stake on the clearing and all his hard work.

The thought of losing the tree house makes the reckless streak in his personality team up with his stubbornness to overcome his fear. That’s his tree house, even if he was just throwing rocks at it a minute ago, and he’s not giving it up that easily. Rock clutched in his hand, he climbs cautiously up the rope ladder, staring upwards, ready at a moment’s notice to scramble back down again.

A huddled figure consisting of long, slim limbs, knobbly knees, a thatch of brown hair and wide eyes comes into view when he peeks over the ledge. It’s a boy. Dean sucks in a surprised breath and the boy does the same.

Lifting his head over the wooden platform, Dean asks in his most threatening voice, “What are you doing here?” wary still, but braver in the face of the other kid’s obvious apprehension.

“Nothing,” the boy whispers, licking dry lips as he creeps closer to the wall and peers at Dean through long brown hair hanging heavily into his eyes.

Dean drops the rock, hauls himself up on to the platform and stands up to his full height. “You shouldn’t be here. This is my tree house. I built it.”

The boy looks Dean over and then casts a glance around, over the knotted humps and lumps in the walls and the buckled flooring. He looks back at Dean. “It isn’t built right,” he says quietly.

Dean blinks in surprise and sputters, “That’s because it keeps growing. It’s not my fault.”

The boy looks back at him steadily, a stubborn tilt to his jaw now. “It’s still not built right.”

Affronted, Dean snaps, “Nobody asked you for your opinion.”

The boy shrugs and rubs his forehead, looks down at the smear of blood on his fingers. “Why were you throwing rocks at it?”

“Did I hit you?”

The boy grimaces and nods, lifts the collar of his shirt and wipes the blood away. Dean notices the simple matching cotton shirt and pants, institutional grey in color, like a uniform. “Sorry,” he says, even though he feels stupid apologizing. He dodges the question by pretending the tree house wasn’t the actual target. “I heard you and thought you might be a killer mutant bear or something.”

The boy’s lips twitch.

“Are you okay?” Dean asks him.

The boy shrugs again. “My head hurts a lot.”

Dean thinks he might be exaggerating. There’s only a small scratch hidden by the heavy fringe of hair. “I said I was sorry. Anyway, you shouldn’t be here.”

“Why?” the boy asks with solemn curiosity.

“It isn’t allowed. The reserve is off-limits to civilians.”

“But you’re here.”

His logic is frustratingly logical. “That doesn’t matter,” Dean answers quickly. “I was here first.”

“Have you got something to eat?”

Dean contemplates the abrupt change in subject, then sits down and starts tugging at the thin green tendrils growing up between the boards, keeping the boy warily in his peripheral vision. “Maybe,” he says after a suitable length of time. “Have you got something to trade?”

“No, I haven’t got anything.”

Dean looks at him skeptically.

“But I could help you, if you wanted me to help you, with the building.”

Dean hisses in irritation and stands up. “I don’t need your help!”

The kid traces a whorl in the wood with his finger. “I’ve been thinking about it. If you aligned the boards differently, where the growth lines are, they’d sort of counteract each other. They’d stop growing so quickly. Look at this section here.”

Reluctantly, Dean goes over and peers at the boards in question over the boy’s shoulder. What he says is true. It’s something Dean has already considered, but he’s not quite sure how to match up the boards in the right way. He has tried, but when it happens, it happens accidentally.

The boy turns and looks up at him, wide eyed and serious. “It’s good, though, that you built all this by yourself. It’s crazy looking, but it’s pretty, like something out of a story.” His lips twitch again as if he’s thinking about smiling.

Dean is flattered but pretends not to be. He gives the boy a disparaging once-over. “Yeah, _you_ couldn’t have done it by yourself. You’re really shrimpy-looking.”

Recently, Dean’s been watching his body changing in the bathroom mirror with a removed sort of fascination: the growth of his legs, the lengthening and bowing, the suggestion of heaviness in his shoulders. He’s not going to allow this skinny, floppy-haired kid to invade his space and simultaneously criticize it.

“It’s not always about how big you are,” the boy counters. “Sometimes other things count more.”

“Like what?”

“Like being smart.”

“I’m smart,” Dean snaps defensively.

“I didn’t say you weren’t. It’s pretty smart to have figured out how to build something like this in the first place, even if you probably should have thought about it a bit harder before you started.”

“Leave nothing today undone,” Dean quotes a slogan from a t-shirt he found in a box of his dad’s things in the attic. “It’s a saying,” he adds when the boy looks uncomprehendingly up at him.

Just then the boy’s stomach rumbles loudly.

“I did bring some food,” Dean says grudgingly. “It’s in my backpack. You go down first and I’ll follow you.”

The boy looks unsure, so Dean says, “I’m not going to push you down the ladder,” but he can’t help adding, “If you think about it, though, this would be a great place to hide a body if you were planning the perfect murder.”

Dean has been watching some of his Dad’s old movies, especially the black and white murder mysteries, and he’s become fascinated (in an abstract sort of way) by the idea of how somebody might go about plotting the perfect murder. It’s a concept that seems both outdated and excitingly forbidden to him. Nobody really gets murdered anymore but he knows that it used to happen a lot. There used to be whole families of people called the mafia who would murder people just for disrespecting them. They came from a place called Italy, which is across the ocean in the dead-zone.

A serious, contemplative expression accompanies the boy’s response. “I don’t know. Things don’t seem to die here. A dead body might try to rise again as a mutant zombie out for revenge.”

Dean laughs, surprised, and also vaguely impressed. “That would be pretty cool.”

The full smile, when it comes, is also a surprise in the way that it transforms the boy’s face. “Yeah, I guess it would be.”

Dean continues the story as they climb down the vine ladder. “But when the zombie tries to climb out of its shallow grave, the roots of all the trees and plants will have grown into its flesh and bones, so it won’t be able to escape.”

He waits expectantly and the boy just naturally picks up from where he ends. “So it spends years, centuries, planning and plotting and fossilizing until it finally pulls itself out of the shallow grave, a monster, half-tree half-man, and takes its revenge on all the ancestors of its murderer.”

Dean likes that enough to give him the bigger half of his cookie when they sit down on the grass underneath the tree house. The boy looks like he needs it. He thinks for a minute before saying, “Until it gets to the very last ancestor, the end of the murderer’s blood line, a seven foot Viking woodcutter living deep in the snowy forests of Scandinavia.”

The boy laughs, some cookie crumbs escaping his mouth. “Really?”

Dean doesn’t dignify the implied criticism of his narrative skills with a response. He hands over an unpleasantly chewy granola bar but keeps two blocks of soft and precious chocolate wrapped in foil for himself, ignoring the envious glances being sent his way.

There’s a silent pause before the kid picks up the story again. “The woodcutter knows that his days are numbered. He can’t defeat the tree zombie but he knows it’s his responsibility to keep his blood line going because they’re a family of monster hunters and it’s destined for one of his children or his grandchildren to save the world in the future.”

Dean remains silent and sucks on one of the blocks of chocolate, pretending not to listen.

“The tree zombie doesn’t realize that the woodcutter knows this girl, that they were secretly watching each other all the time and had fallen in love. Nobody knew. Not even her parents. So the woodcutter sneaks into the village late one night and uh... you know...”

Dean glances sideways to see the boy blushing. He smirks but can’t stop the heat that rises in his own face.

“Anyway, so on the night the tree zombie comes to kill him, the woodcutter fights hard because he desperately wants to live, but in the end he dies heroically by sacrificing himself and burning down the forest, because he knows that he’s left part of himself behind.”

“That’s a pretty lame ending,” Dean says without meaning it and hands over the other block of chocolate.

They sit for a little while without talking, thinking about zombies, about leaving part of yourself behind, about homework, about how hungry they still are and how much they’re dreading dinnertime, not realizing how much their thoughts are following similar paths as they watch the orange sun sinking lower through the green of the trees.

“I need to go home. My mom’s going to kill me.” Dean gets up and looks down at the boy. “If you want to come back tomorrow and help me build, that would be okay, but don’t go up there without me, okay?”

“Okay.”

Dean likes the boy’s simple acceptance, the way that he doesn’t have to justify his possessiveness. “Okay then. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

****

**The clones**

****

And they do see each other the next day, but not at the clearing.

Most of the school is excitedly waiting for the arrival of the Geneticore kids and Dean is sitting with some other students on a wall at the entrance waiting to jeer at the clones as they file through the front gate.

The principal explained to them in a special assembly how schools all around the country have to open their doors to the clones because there aren’t enough teachers to educate them in the institutions. Dean has a cousin in another sector who has been sharing classes with cloned kids since last year already. He told Dean that all of them were really weird and quiet and that they didn’t stick up for themselves, even when the real kids played nasty tricks on them. He thought that maybe they didn’t actually have proper feelings, not like normal people, and recounted a story about a group of boys holding down a cloned girl and stapling a “Kick Me” note to her back that she didn’t try to remove, even though there were splotches of blood on her shirt. She got kicked all day and didn’t cry, not even once, and Dean’s cousin was in all the same classes as she was, so he definitely would have seen if she had cried.

The principal had instructed them to be restrained and orderly but there’s a buzz of uncontrolled excitement in the air when the clones arrive in big transporters with darkened windows. They get off and start to file into the school, wearing grey uniforms and walking past with identical, closed expressions and downcast eyes.

And that’s when Dean notices the boy from the clearing. He glances at Dean, must recognize him, but doesn’t acknowledge him in any way. The kid next to Dean on the wall puts his leg out and trips the boy. Everybody laughs. The clones hardly respond, just carry on filing past, but for a second there’s a flash of emotion in the boy’s expression when he looks straight at Dean after stumbling over the other kid’s outstretched leg. It’s unsettling. Dean isn’t used to these feelings of guilt and shame and decides he definitely doesn’t like them.

It’s a really strange day and nobody does much work; even some of the teachers are acting weirdly. They seem nervous, talking too quickly and too cheerfully. The clones sit silently by themselves in class and don’t interact with anyone, not even with each other.

Fourth lesson into the day and Dean’s bored and hungry, looking out the window and wondering why all the clouds look like hybrid animals. The teacher is moving around the room collecting in their assignments. Dean glances at her as she takes a piece of paper from a cloned girl. The girl and the teacher’s fingers inadvertently brush against each other and the teacher quickly jerks her hand back as if she just touched something really unpleasant. She looks embarrassed and starts blushing. Dean didn’t think teachers were physically capable of blushing. The cloned kid tightly clasps her hands in her lap, her eyes lowered and cheeks pink. The teacher looks around and Dean quickly averts his gaze, pretends he didn’t see anything.

At lunchtime Dean has to stay behind to catch up with homework after class and pretend to listen to a boring sermon from his Physics teacher. The usual stuff about his social responsibility to do his best and be someone who counts, that the dwindling population of original human beings makes achievement a necessity, not a luxury.

The cafeteria is almost empty when he eventually gets there. The boy from the clearing is eating by himself at a table. Dean gets his lunch and sits a few seats down from him on the opposite side of the table, giving him furtive little glances. The boy ignores him.

After a few minutes Dean hears a sharply indrawn breath. He looks up from his lunch to see that a group of bigger kids at a table behind the boy are sniggering. One of them—a mean, aggressive kid that Dean can’t stand—is flicking food from the end of his fork at the back of the boy’s head.

The boy’s expression is a closed mask of acceptance as he sits rigidly in his seat, his knife and fork slack in his hands, flinching slightly each time he’s hit, noodles and sauce dripping from his hair and sticking to his shoulders.

Looking at him like that, Dean makes a decision. He calmly sets aside his plate, scrapes back his chair, stands up, steps up onto the chair, over the table and down the other side, mock strolls up behind the older kid, who looks over his shoulder with a comically confused expression just before Dean shoves his face straight into his plate.

Dean doesn’t let go, has both his hands clamped tightly around the back of the kid’s head and neck, pressing him facedown and trying to drown him in pasta sauce. He’s vaguely aware of noise and commotion around him but has gone into tunnel-vision mode. It happens to him sometimes. It takes a kidney punch to snap him out of it and three of the bigger kids to haul him off.

An hour later he’s in the principal’s office with his mother, distracted by a throbbing pain in his side and a tingling bruise waiting to swell his cheek, sitting through his second lecture for the day.

It’s not the first time Dean has been in trouble for fighting at school. It’s becoming _a worrying pattern of behaviour_ , according to the principal.

_Anger management... mediocre academic performance... a general lack of engagement... social withdrawal... grief and confusion over the regrettable death of his father._

Dean’s heard all of it before. By the time the principal starts on the social responsibility argument, he has totally zoned out, but he tries to look vaguely remorseful when he catches his mother glaring at him. Her face is too tight for a full expression; she was at the NewYou spa when the school summoned her to take him home. She spends a lot of time there.

They continue talking about him as if he weren’t in the room so Dean starts counting the holes in the air vent behind the principal’s head. He likes counting things, finds it to be a surprisingly soothing activity. Plus, it has the added benefit of making it appear as if he’s earnestly concentrating on whatever the principal is saying.

In deference to his mother’s faith and senior position in the Mother’s Union, the principal says, “Blessed be the bountiful mother,” at the door as they’re leaving, shakes his mother’s hand and gives Dean another disappointed look.

“Blessed be,” His mother responds shortly and grips Dean’s shoulder to lead him out, her long nails digging into his skin.

She doesn’t say anything until they get out of the building and into the car.

“It’s embarrassing, Dean, that’s what it is!”

Dean sighs, stares out the car window and waits for his third lecture of the day. He’s heading towards a personal best.

His mother sharply presses the button to close the window between them and the driver before turning to face him with the full force of her irritation. “This thuggish behavior reflects badly on me. You need to grow up and accept the way things are, as I’ve had to. He left us, Dean. Both of us. We don’t owe him or his memory anything. He abandoned his family and his responsibilities. He probably didn’t even care about us in the first place; otherwise, he wouldn’t have been leading a secret double life and involved in who knows what illegal activities. I’m sorry, but the truth is that your father got what he deserved. Brian tries to be a good father to you. _He’s_ the model you should be aspiring to.”

Brian spends most of his time at work and is barely even aware of Dean’s existence. But Dean doesn’t say that. He just wants the lecture to be over with.

His mother takes out a compact and studies her reflection in the mirror, smoothing the tight line of her jaw and the puffiness around her eyes. “I suppose you’re upset about the clones coming into school. And that’s understandable. We’re all upset about it. Just stay away from them and concentrate on your work.”

“This other kid was being really mean to one of them in the cafeteria.”

His mother glances sharply at him. “So you thought it was your responsibility to protect one of them? God, you’re just like him sometimes: stupidly sentimental about things that don’t matter and oblivious to the things that do.” She takes a tube of lipstick out of her bag, slides the pale pink across her lips and pouts at her reflection. She used to be really pretty but Dean doesn’t like how tight and pale her skin is now. She reminds him of one of those hard-faced, yellow-haired porcelain dolls he’s seen in the museum.

She turns in her seat and takes his hand in a conciliatory gesture. “They’re not like us, honey. They’re more like animals, and sure, it’s not nice to be cruel to simple creatures, but you have to keep in mind that they don’t have feelings like we do. They don’t have the pieces of us that make us truly human. They don’t have a soul.”

“How do you know that for sure?”

She sighs and frowns at the dirt under his fingernails, tries to run a long nail under one of his to clean it, an irritating habit that Dean hates. He pulls his hand away.

She sighs again. “Because you cannot copy a soul. Only God can create the essence of the human spirit. Don’t they teach you this in your Ethics lessons? Why am I paying such a fortune for your education when you don’t seem to be learning anything?”

Of course, she doesn’t actually pay for anything herself. Brian does. He pays for the expensive presents and the expensive school and for his mother to spend all her time at the expensive spa or at Mother’s Union meetings. Ready-made families don’t come cheaply for men who are ambitious and don’t have the time or the sperm count to make one of their own.

“They’re genetically designed, Dean, man-made, like the A.I. machines. Some of them are really smart and designed to work in higher level jobs, some of them are soldiers or fodder for the factories and others are designed for... less pleasant occupations. But all of them are working drones. They don’t have a real mother; they’re just birthed by breeder clones. Scientists can’t create a soul in a laboratory. Only a fertile human mother can be the blessed vessel for God’s greatest creation. And that’s what you are, baby.” She leans forward and kisses him on the forehead, gently pats his swelling cheek. “Now stop fighting at school and try to improve your grades.”

That’s the signal for the subject now being closed. Dean has noticed his mother will do that. If something makes her angry or unhappy, she either ignores it or pretends it’s something different.

When they get home, Dean lies on his bed and waits until he hears her go out again before removing one of the ceiling boards in his bedroom and sliding out the box of his father’s things. She’d go ballistic if she knew he had it. Dean isn’t even sure she knows the box exists. He found it one afternoon about six months after his dad’s disappearance when he was messing around in the attic.

He goes through all the familiar objects again, lifting out each one and handling it like a blind person might investigate the appearance of something through touch. His dad used to be a collector, mainly stuff from the 1960s and 1970s, music records and memorabilia, a leather jacket, some old t-shirts in protective plastic covers. Museum pieces. There are some old, faded paper leaflets and booklets tied together that he doesn’t unwrap. Most of them are banned anti-genetic-experimentation leaflets. He doesn’t like looking at them because the pictures give him nightmares. There are also propaganda booklets from organizations Dean has never heard of. It’s all stuff from an older world that he can’t quite imagine.

“Who were you?” Dean whispers, his face buried in the smell of the leather jacket. “What were you doing?” It offers no answers to his questions. Nothing in the box does.

His dad was killed in some sort of explosion. Geneticore men came to the house and questioned his mother, took away his dad’s computer, poked around the house, but without urgency or thoroughness, as if they already had the answers they wanted. They told them that for over two years Dean’s dad had been secretly working for a militant fringe group that was targeting government projects, like the genetic institutions. They said he was seduced by their lies, by their outlandish conspiracy theories. His mom had never explained it properly to Dean, and when he tries to ask her about it, she makes him feel guilty by crying or slipping into a depression that can last for days. It’s just not worth it anymore.

Dean sets aside the leather jacket and picks out a sonogram printout from the box. He traces a finger slowly around the outline of a head, the face, a little bump of a nose, down the chin and the vulnerable swell of a chest. Dean’s brother swimming in his own secret grey world. As he’s done hundreds of times before, Dean wonders how different his life would have been if his brother had survived childbirth.

But there’s no point in wondering about what can never be. Dean has no brother and no father. He gives the sonogram and the leather jacket a final stroke each and packs everything neatly back into the box.

His mom grounded him but Dean knows she won’t be back before dinnertime. She never is. He has a couple of hours before then.

It’s possible that the boy got scared off after the fight in the cafeteria and won’t be at the clearing, but Dean doesn’t think so.

He’s right. The boy is standing beneath the tree house waiting for him to come crashing through the jungle. Stealth is difficult through the thick screen of plants. Dean crosses the clearing and stands awkwardly in front of him, waiting, irritated at feeling off-balance in his own familiar space.

“Does it hurt?” the boy asks, looking at Dean’s cheek.

“No,” Dean lies.

“You’re lying.”

“So why ask if you already know?”

“It’s the kind of thing people are expected to say.”

“What? Do they give you a manual at the institution? The beginner’s guide to useful conversational phrases. Human interaction 101.”

The boy looks at him coolly. “You’re a very angry person. You should try to deal with your feelings. It’s not good to be out of control.”

Dean really doesn’t need another lecture. Not today, not here, and not from this cloned kid who has no right to criticize him. “And you should just shut up. What do you know anyway? You’re just a cheap knockoff of a real person. And you’re welcome, by the way, roboboy!” Dean shoulders past him to check on the traps. His hands are shaking as he frees a green shrew with massive twinned ears and a stumped nose.

“My name’s Sam and I actually don’t have any mechanized parts.”

Dean’s about to make some sarcastic comment about the pointlessness of having a real name if a serial number will do when he picks up on the slight inflection in the boy’s voice. It’s a joke. He remains crouched in front of the trap, twists around and looks up at Sam, who is standing directly behind him, his lips pursed in a way that Dean is starting to realize means he’s stifling a smile.

Dean snorts in acknowledgement of the joke and his own rude behavior. “Sorry, I didn’t mean that. It’s just—I don’t know. It’s just been a weird and shitty day.”

Sam nods.

“My dad died two years ago. He got blown up.”

Sam hesitates then nods again as if that was a perfectly normal thing to say. Dean doesn’t know why he said it except maybe it explains why he’s angry quite a lot of the time. He grips Sam’s hand, turns it over and looks at the tattoo on the inside of his wrist. Sam stiffens and looks like he’s going to pull away, then relaxes and allows Dean to rub a finger over the printed code. He can feel the tracker chip embedded just under Sam’s skin. He looks up at Sam. “So that’s who you are?”

Sam looks at the tattoo and shakes his head. “No, that’s my original’s code. I’m a copy, but I’m not exactly the same.”

“Do you know who he is? Your original?”

“No.”

“Do you wonder about him?”

“All the time.”

“I guess you would.” Dean lets go of his hand and stands up. “Do you want to help me trim the tree house? I have to do it almost every day or it starts to grow into the tree.”

“Okay. Will you bring me something to eat next time?”

“Yeah, okay.” Dean feels happier now that they are on familiar transactional ground. He smiles at the assumed _next time_.

“Dean?”

Dean was walking back towards the tree house. He turns around at the unexpected sound of his name. “Yeah?”

“Why did you do that today?”

Pausing, Dean studies the ground and considers his response. He hadn’t been thinking about what he was doing, just acted on instinct. He’s been told on numerous occasions that it’s a character fault. “Because I hate that kid and because it wasn’t fair. Don’t flatter yourself. It wasn’t really about you.”

Sam frowns and looks at Dean like he’s a puzzle with some missing pieces that he’s trying to fit together.

Dean turns quickly away and starts bossily telling Sam which tools to get out of the strongbox.

****

**Friendship**

Dean is a noisy thinker. When he’s trying to figure something out, he paces up and down and talks out loud to himself. But not Sam. It takes him less than two weeks to figure out how the copper rods in the strongbox work. He’s really quiet, thoughtful and careful, doesn’t test his ideas on Dean, just works it out silently by himself. Dean whistles, sings, talks the whole time while he’s building and trying to match up the boards in the way Sam had showed him. Sometimes he’ll just stop and watch Sam’s quiet concentration, and Sam will look up at him and make a response to something Dean had said and already forgotten, showing that he’d been listening attentively the whole time.

Sam joins Dean’s Science class a few days after the clones arrive. The teachers had realized how smart he is and moved him up into an older group. Sam is a year and a bit younger than Dean - physically he looks younger but intellectually he’s way smarter than most people Dean knows, even grown-ups.

During one lesson, when the teacher is demonstrating an experiment wearing protective fine-mesh metal gloves, Sam gives him a look across the group of students. Dean, who had been watching Sam anyway—it’s becoming a habit—picks up the silent communication from his impassive expression and slips the gloves into his bag when the teacher’s back is turned.

They use the gloves to slot the copper rods into wooden casings that they fit into grooves drilled into the tree house. Dean vaguely misses the surprise of how much the tree house used to change overnight but at least they can now finish constructing the walls and roof without the daily chore of trimming the new growth. The boards grow tightly into each other, a living structure, orderly and organic in a way that it wasn’t before when Dean was doing it by himself.

It takes them another three months to finish it. They would have completed it earlier, but Sam catches a flu virus, and Dean spends endless days nervously waiting for him to recover. It surprises him how quickly he’s become used to having Sam around, how scared he gets at the thought of him not being around anymore.

Seven kids are dead after the outbreak. Five real kids and two clones. The clones have a slightly better resistance to the viruses.

Sam is thin and pale when he returns to school. Dean brushes up against him in the lunch queue and gently nudges him to express his relief and happiness at seeing him. He does it surreptitiously. They don’t acknowledge each other at school. Sam smiles slightly, his eyes lowered.

At the clearing Sam is bemused by Dean’s care but doesn’t embarrass him by drawing attention to it. He tries really hard to eat everything Dean brings him and dutifully wraps up in a thermal blanket as he watches Dean working. He’s too weak to do anything himself. Dean downloads books for Sam on the battered old pocket-reader he presents Dean with when he’s asked what else would make him feel better. Dean doesn’t ask Sam where he got it from. Clones aren’t allowed to read fiction. They’re banned from taking certain classes at school and Literature is one of them.

Dean is kind of envious and jokingly says as much.

Sam doesn’t do angry in the way most people do, but Dean’s starting to recognize Sam’s particular brand of fury. He gets this blank expression and retreats behind a wall of cold silence that is impossible to break down until he’s ready to let it go. It’s very frustrating.

He doesn’t talk to Dean for hours after he makes the joke. Dean gets it and feels bad for being so tactless. It must be crappy to actually _want_ to read books and then not be allowed to. He practices remorse by being quiet and undemanding and is eventually forgiven. It’s like a ritual between them. Dean behaves like an ass; Sam goes into silent mode; Dean feels really bad and tries to make it up to him; Sam forgives him.

Sam is the only person Dean’s willing to play that game with, mostly because he knows Sam doesn’t play it like a game, not in the way that people like his mom do. His mom uses her silence and unhappiness like a weapon.

Dean gradually kits out the tree house with a pair of air mattresses, some posters, and games, and an old chess set. Sam is obsessed with chess. All that quiet, concentrated strategizing appeals to something in his character. He doesn’t like playing on Dean’s tablet and insists on a real board with real pieces.

They slip into an easy routine of spending their afternoons exploring the biopark and setting traps to study the mutated animals. They play games of soccer in the clearing, computer games on Dean’s tablet in the tree house and do their homework together. Dean’s Math and Science grades rapidly improve with Sam’s help. He’s a good tutor, never gives Dean the answers, explains things patiently to him and just waits with a resigned air if Dean gets frustrated and starts kicking things.

Sometimes when they’re out in the reserve, Sam will indulge Dean in role-playing games where they’re hunters or soldiers, but he never really commits himself to the fantasy, so it all feels a bit weird and stilted and childish.

One afternoon, Sam sort of tricks Dean into reading aloud the first chapter of his class novel while Sam’s fitting together the smaller components of Dean’s electronics project for him. Dean couldn’t say no when Sam asked him to read. He needs him to complete his project because his blunt fingers are literally incapable of the fine, delicate work that Sam does with such ease.

And somehow after that they end up regularly taking it in turns to read aloud to each other during the final half hour they have at the biopark before Dean has to go home and Sam has to go back to the institution. They lie on the air mattresses in the tree house, tired after a busy afternoon, listening to the soothing drone of each other’s voices.

Dean doesn’t remember when he starts to genuinely enjoy it for his own sake rather than it just being about looking forward to Sam’s stupid, lazy-eyed happiness, the way he looks at Dean like he’s sharing some big secret with him as he’s reading. Maybe it’s when Sam starts to lose his self-consciousness when it’s his turn to read and allows himself to be engrossed in the story, the way he frowns sometimes and raises his eyebrows, absorbed by a new complication. Dean hopes he doesn’t wear that same goofy expression when he’s reading.

**Disgraced teachers and sexy stories**

****

About a year after they become friends, a new Literature teacher arrives at school, a young, serious-looking guy who walks around the classroom with a dreamy expression quoting stuff. He doesn’t last very long. He gets arrested at school—literally dragged from his classroom and out the front gates by government men accompanied by Geneticore guards—for teaching banned literature. But not before Dean had hacked into his personal reader and copied his library as a gift for Sam.

Dean gets to choose the first book they read from the disgraced teacher’s library after winning rock, paper, scissors. He chooses it because it’s an action-filled war story set on another planet. The summary also makes it sound like there might be sex in it and he’s happily anticipating Sam’s embarrassment.

It’s written in a weird, sarcastic sort of style that Dean finds difficult to voice at first, but once he gets into it, he forgets about everything else because he’s so wrapped up in the story.

He’s in the middle of reading a really tense scene when Sam suddenly jumps up and exclaims, “I have to go!” He’s already halfway down the ladder before Dean can even finish the sentence he was reading. He looks at his watch and realizes how late it is. Sam has just ten minutes to make it back to the institution. He normally needs double that, and he isn’t allowed to be late.

Sam refuses to talk about the institution and tries to get around Dean’s questions by pretending to answer them, even though he doesn’t really, so in Dean’s imagination it has become this unknown, secretive place that swallows Sam up at the end of the day, a huge, grey factory of kids where lateness is probably punished with violence.

**Science fiction and haircuts**

“Why is that funny?”

It’s the next day, and by some sort of complicit, silent agreement they had flopped onto one of the air mattresses as soon as they arrived at the tree house so they could read the book. Sam had shrugged and avoided the question when Dean asked him if he’d gotten into trouble for being late. Dean could see it was futile to push the point, so he just started reading.

Sam is now staring at him narrowly, his forehead furrowed in a frown, lying really close next to him. It was Sam who first started lying on the same mattress with him. It makes sense. They don’t have to raise their voices to make themselves heard when they’re reading. Dean has grown to really like it, the warmth of Sam’s body next to him, his quiet breathing and the feeling of being cocooned in a completely private space of their own.

“I wasn’t laughing.”

“Your face squinched up as if you were thinking it was funny.”

“He’s suggesting they eat the poor people to solve the hunger and overpopulation crisis!”

“And you think that’s funny?”

“It’s not ha-ha funny. It’s like a bad joke.”

“I don’t understand. He’s on this other planet so he can help this alien race, right?”

“Yeah.”

“And they’ve just had this terrible war. Everybody’s starving and there are all these people suffering and the main character, who is the good guy, is suggesting they eat the poor people, butcher them and label the meat according to the region they’re from, like animals?”

Dean starts snorting with laughter. “It’s meant to be a joke, Sam. It’s not like these vegetarian rebels are going to take him seriously.”

“Yes, but why is it funny?”

“It’s funny because it shouldn’t be funny. Because it’s gross and horrible and cruel. Anyway, he doesn’t mean it.”

“I know that. He means it as a criticism of the elite ruling class. I’m not stupid. I understand that. I just don’t understand what makes it funny. Why did it make you want to laugh?”

“I can’t explain it if you don’t get it. Jokes don’t work like that.”

Sam sighs. Dean sighs even louder and continues reading on his own in silence. Sam huffs again and rolls onto his stomach so that he can read with him. They jostle a little for shoulder space and then partly forget each other except as a physical presence sharing body heat. They read at pretty much the same pace. Dean is maybe a little quicker but there isn’t much in it.

When they get to the dirty part of the book, it’s a whole lot more explicit than Dean thought it was going to be. The main guy in the story is in bed with an alien woman he has fallen in love with and the writer goes into detail about the smooth, cool texture of her naked, blue skin and the way her forked tongue wraps around the guy’s dick as she goes down on him.

Dean is lost in wondering what that would feel like when Sam makes a surprised sound next to him. Dean glances sideways to see him blushing as he’s reading. Sam turns his head and gives him an embarrassed look through his thick fringe.

Dean doesn’t know why he does it, it’s a weird thing to do and he regrets it immediately, but he can’t seem to help it. He lifts a hand and gently parts Sam’s fringe, tucking one thick curtain behind his ear. Sam draws in a startled breath and then his eyes drop to Dean’s mouth.

(And that’s what Dean thinks about later when he’s touching himself in bed: the way Sam’s eyes had lingered on his mouth and how Sam’s lips had parted when he looked up again to meet his gaze. Dean spends a lot of time with Sam, or thinking about Sam when he’s not actually with him, so it’s not surprising that he slips into his thoughts when he’s doing this too. It’s happened before. It doesn’t really mean anything. Dean has skim-read the books on adolescence his mother gave him and they’ve covered it in Sexual Development lessons at school. He’s been told that arousal and procreation are to be celebrated, but with the proviso that it’s in the right context, of course. Homosexuality is illegal, as is the unauthorized breeding with female clones because they’re Geneticore property. Sam is a boy and a clone. It’s a double complication. Dean wonders if maybe the two cancel each other out.)

Dean lowers his eyes first and gruffly asks, “You done with this page? Can I scroll to the next one?”

Sam nods and swallows hard.

“I don’t know how you can even see through all that hair. You seriously need a haircut.”

Sam nods again. “Yes, I know.” His voice sounds scratchy.

Dean tries to read the next page but he can’t concentrate anymore and the words just blur on the screen. Sam is a distracting, searing heat next to him. He can feel himself starting to sweat. Sam tries to casually move away from him so they’re not lying so close together.

Dean quickly asks, “Do you want to play soccer?”

“Yes!” Sam answers with obvious relief and jumps up.

They play a quick game, both of them clumsy and uncharacteristically out of synch with each other, before calling it a day.

The next afternoon Dean brings a pair of scissors with him.

Sam is skeptical at first but finally concedes to a haircut. He sits on a fold-up stool and Dean moves around him, frowning at all the long, unruly bits that need trimming. It looks like somebody used garden shears to cut his hair before.

Dean lifts a section and neatly cuts an inch off the ends. He runs his fingers through Sam’s hair, trying to lift another equal section and as he does it he lightly scrapes his nails against Sam’s scalp. Sam sighs quietly, a soft whooshing of air.

It reminds Dean of how warm and compliant Sam had been in the dreamy, pre-sleep fantasy he’d been having in bed last night, the way he’d allowed Dean to touch him, to be close to him.

Surprised at this overlapping of fantasy-Sam and real-Sam, Dean cards his fingers through Sam’s hair again and watches with fascination as goose bumps spread their way down Sam’s neck and shoulders. Like it’s contagious, Dean’s skin prickles with awareness. He discovers that it’s really nice being this close to Sam. He likes the warmth coming off Sam’s skin and the way he smells. He has an excuse to let his fingers press against the nape of his neck and just behind his ears. Sam shivers when he does it. And Dean discovers he really likes that too.

Sam’s tightly clenched hands are resting on his thighs, his posture rigid, as Dean circles him, snipping away, pretending not to notice his reactions.

Compelled by a mischievous instinct to see how far he can push things, Dean stands in front of Sam, one leg between his thighs, the other on the outside of Sam’s right knee. He clenches slightly so Sam’s leg is firmly wedged between his and lifts Sam’s chin so he can consider his thick fringe. Sam looks up at him and Dean’s cocky arrogance disappears immediately at the expression on his face. The emotion is being held in check, but it’s there on Sam’s face. He’s flushed, looks frustrated and really unhappy, like he’s in pain.

Dean wants to wipe away that expression and instinctively knows what course of action will help him do it. Tightening his fingers on Sam’s jaw, Dean stops breathing for a couple of seconds and sways forward. Sam draws in a soft breath, his mouth vulnerable and slightly open. Dean can feel the thudding of his heart against his ribcage. He’s on the edge of a sheer cliff, part of him wanting to turn back to safety, but another part, the part of himself that is drunk on vertigo, is encouraging him to jump.

Before he can make a decision either way, a flock of birds noisily take off from the nearby trees. The sound breaks the enchantment of the moment. Both of them startle. Dean drops the scissors and they land, sharp end first, on the bridge of his bare foot. He squawks loudly and starts jumping up and down on one leg. Sam bursts into nervous laughter.

Dean rubs his foot hard to counteract the sharp, shocking pain. The skin is broken and beads of blood smear against his skin when he rubs it. Embarrassed, he leans down and picks up the scissors, shuffles on his feet, waits for a look of agreement from Sam before he steps closer again, feeling clumsy, too tight and contained in his skin, his fingers thick and awkward.

It isn’t like it was before. Sam sits in the stool like a statue with his eyes closed and Dean feels ungainly, thinks he’s breathing too loudly and tries to take little sips of air through his mouth. Neither of them says anything and the silence is a heavy, awkward presence in the clearing.

Afterwards, he steps back to survey his handiwork. It’s not exactly professional-looking but it’s better than it was.

“Do I pass inspection?”

“You look a bit less like a scarecrow I guess. You’ll do.”

Sam stands up and brushes away the hair sticking to his neck and forehead. “Thanks, Dean. I’m going to go now. I’ve got some stuff to do for tomorrow.”

“Oh, okay.” Dean’s surprised and bit hurt. He feels dismissed. Sam wants to leave early because he doesn’t want to read the book with him and he probably thinks Dean is being weird and perverted. Dean’s face flushes with embarrassment. “Sure, whatever. I’ve got to get home anyway.”

Things are a bit weird and uncomfortable between them after that. A constant, hidden tension charges the air when they’re together. It’s exhausting, frustrating and exciting at the same time. And it drags out for weeks.

Then something happens to snap the tension between them and shift it elsewhere.

**Secrets and lies**

****

Dean never learns the whole truth of what happened to Sam at the institution. Not even later. It’s something Sam never talks about.

It starts with him not turning up at the clearing one day. Dean worries about him all afternoon and hardly sleeps that night. The next day he confronts Sam in the bathroom at school and Sam just blows him off with an excuse about how he’s got all these extra chores at the institution.

He doesn’t turn up at the clearing the next day either, nor the one after that, and the one after that. Dean doesn’t know what to do. It’s difficult for him to find an opportunity at school to talk openly with Sam. He’s confused, can’t understand why Sam has suddenly become so closed-off and withdrawn. He finds himself pacing his room at night when he’s supposed to be sleeping, having imaginary conversations with Sam instead. At first, he remembers how his dad used to pace rooms all the time and that makes his anxiety less embarrassing, but mostly he worries about turning into his mom.

Sam eventually turns up at the clearing, but he’s got all his icy barriers up and makes Dean feel stupid for constantly asking him what’s wrong by replying to his questions with barely concealed scorn. Dean didn’t even know that Sam could do sarcasm. He thinks of clever come-backs afterwards and reconstructs their conversation in his head so that he has the upper hand.

Things go on like that until Dean’s feeling brittle as old glass. Sam comes to the clearing only intermittently, and even when he does, it’s like he’s not really there. When Dean tries to push him for answers, he just stops turning up and totally blanks him at school as if they were strangers until Dean has to back off.

It comes to a head one afternoon when they’re playing soccer for the first time in weeks. Sam trips over the ball and as he falls his shirt gets twisted up so Dean can see nasty, purple bruises all down his side. Sam covers himself quickly and tries to get up but Dean pushes him back down to the ground and straddles him. It’s a flash point, one that Dean is not going to let go. They have a tug of war over Sam’s shirt that Dean finally wins, pulling it up to reveal the marks on his body. “What happened? Who did this to you?” he asks fiercely, knees on Sam’s arms, pinning him to the ground.

Sam stops struggling, lies there and stares up at some point just to the side of Dean’s face, refuses to answer, becomes blankly absent in the way that he can do that.

And Dean just starts to cry. It comes from nowhere but he can’t help it. They’re tears of frustration and anger because he doesn’t know how to get through to Sam. He’s just so scared Sam is going to carry on retreating further and further away from him and there’s nothing he can do about it.

“Please just tell me. I want to help you. Why won’t you talk to me?” His voice breaks and Sam looks up at him, a glimpse of his real self visible in his expression when he notices Dean’s tears. He frowns and reaches up to wipe Dean’s cheek. It’s such an unconscious gesture that more tears well up in Dean’s eyes.

For a fraction of a second Dean thinks that maybe he’s finally gotten through to him, but then Sam looks away and his eyes glaze over. “You can’t help me,” he says in a monotone. “Get off me, Dean.”

Dean wants to insist but he knows if he pushes too hard Sam will just disappear from his life for good, knows it like he knows his dad will never suddenly walk through the front door one day. He rolls off and lies there on the grass staring up at the sky, tears leaking out the corners of his eyes as Sam walks away.

Just when he thinks he can’t handle it anymore, that something has to break, things shift again.

Sam arrives at the clearing one afternoon in a state of feverish excitement. He’s jittery, pacing up and down, talking constantly, none of it making much sense. He doesn’t stay for long, suddenly jumps up during a game of chess Dean initiated in the hope that it would settle him down and says he has to go.

“What do you mean you have to go? Go where?”

Sam’s leg is bouncing up and down and his bottom lip is caught between his teeth. “I just have to go. I have to go now. There are things I need to do. I don’t have to tell you everything. You don’t give me space to even breathe sometimes.”

“I don’t— You don’t—You never tell me anything.” Dean hides his hurt. “Fine, if you find me so suffocating, then just go.”

Sam doesn’t look back, sprints across the clearing and disappears into the forest.

Dean sits there, feeling desolate, too unhappy to allow himself the emotional release of tears, before getting up and tiredly making his way back home to another sleepless night.

None of the clones turn up to school the next day. Dean hears that a supervisor at the institution died after he fell down a flight of stairs and broke his neck. There are rumors floating around that he was pushed. The clones are back in class the next morning. A few of them look like they’ve been through hell and Dean overhears two teachers talking about how they were interrogated by Geneticore security men. Dean guesses none of them said anything because nothing else happens after that.

Sam, of course, refuses to talk about it. He lies and says he didn’t really know the supervisor. He got worked over by the security men—one of his fingers is broken and both his ears are really swollen and red—but they didn’t get anything out of him because he knows nothing. Dean guesses he’s probably the only person on the planet who can tell when Sam is lying and that’s only because he has spent hours and hours watching him closely.

“Could one of the cloned kids have pushed him? Why would they think that? Sam, are you listening to me?”

Sam’s staring up at the tree house above them, eyes unfocused, his mind obviously elsewhere. He turns and looks at Dean, coolly responds, “It’s boring when you go on and on about the same things. I told you—I don’t know. Stop asking me so many questions. You’re as bad as a Geneticore security officer.”

Dean sucks in a startled, wounded breath.

Sam stands up. “Let’s just play soccer, okay?” He puts his hand out to pull Dean up. “I come here, Dean, because it makes me feel... safe and happy. Please stop interrogating me.”

Dean clenches his jaw and looks at Sam’s outstretched hand for a few silent seconds before finally accepting it.

Dean’s pretty sure Sam’s bruises were caused by the supervisor, and he’s probably not the only cloned kid who was being hurt by him. The Geneticore institutions are shrouded in secrecy and the originals who work there probably have free rein to do whatever they like to the clones. A lot of people barely view the clones as humans. They’re expendable. So the supervisor got killed and the clones aren’t saying anything about what they know.

Dean looks at Sam as they play soccer and wonders if he has it in him to kill someone. The thought makes him shiver. Dean has this very grown-up moment of realizing that probably everybody has it in them if they’re pushed far enough.

Dean supposes if clones don’t have a soul, as his mother believes, then they don’t have to worry about placing it in jeopardy by doing really bad things. He thinks if that were true, then it could make the clones very dangerous and that it’s probably a good thing they were designed to be passive.

**Being in love with Sam**

After a while things start to go back to how they were before. Well, not quite the way they were before. Sam is changed by whatever happened at the institution. He’s harder, less innocent, even more secretive, and that’s saying something.

****

It’s probably because of some stubborn, masochistic streak in Dean’s nature that Sam’s elusiveness just makes him more adamant to hold on, to force him to open up. Sometimes he just wants to crack Sam open like a nut.

At the age of sixteen he realizes he’s in love with Sam. Exactly what that means he’s not entirely sure, but he thinks IN LOVE is probably the term for it. It’s not a pleasant thing, being in love with Sam: it’s a frustrated yearning, a constant pretending. Sam is an unattainable secret hidden behind armor-plated walls and moats and mazes.

But Dean is stoical by nature and accepts that this is his fate, to secretly love a person who lacks the essence of personhood, a copy of someone else who Dean will never know. He thinks about Sam’s original sometimes, wonders if things would be different with him, if they’d be closer, if the real Sam would love him back. He tries not to let his mind wander too far down those avenues, though. It’s a betrayal of this Sam, his Sam, and it’s dangerous. Men die now for being in love with other men. There are live execution videos online, a warning against wasted love and the wasting of precious seed.

**The afternoon that forever changes everything**

The year Dean turns seventeen the government finally collapses, a militant splinter group breaks away from the Mother’s Union, causing his mother to descend into an extended bout of depression, and Sam moves another class ahead of him into the specialized Science and Technology College attached to the school.

Geneticore officially takes over state duties, which is pretty much just a formality as an independent government hasn’t existed for years. But the public announcement makes it official in a way that people could pretend it wasn’t before and there’s a lot of emotional symbolism in lowering the old national flag outside of administrative buildings—at least Geneticore isn’t crass enough to raise a new one with their logo splashed across it—so demonstrations and then later riots spark up in cities across the country.

Civil unrest is quickly quashed. A national state of emergency comes into force, any semblance left of an independent media is completely dismantled and public assembly is rigorously regulated.

These are all things that don’t really affect Dean. They are peripheral to his own narrow life, which still centers on school, the clearing at the biopark, and on Sam.

Elephant Man dies in the summer of that year. Dean finds him. One hot afternoon he sees this fabric covered hump some distance away on the dirt road that skirts the park. He ignores it, follows his usual route to the clearing but turns around as soon as he gets there, the sight of that thing nagging at him.

He doesn’t like being out in the open at the biopark’s borders but hesitates for a long time where he is at the intersection of the path into the wild interior and the exposed road, watching for any movement from the shape in the distance.

Some part of him had subconsciously known as soon as he’d seen it. He could have ignored it, but that’s not what people do. He approaches the body warily and kneels next to it. It’s collapsed on its back over the grassy ridge between the parallel dirt tracks. Dean lifts the dignity-mask and draws in a sharp breath at how distorted the features are. Recovering from his initial shock, he is able to recognize the very human old man beneath the mutation and suddenly he’s overcome with the most intense sadness, feels suffocated by it and has to stand up quickly, dizzy and swaying slightly.

There’s nothing he can do. It was probably a heart attack or a stroke or something. There are no obvious wounds on the body. He actually looks quite peaceful, so Dean gently lowers the mask and walks away.

The body lies there for two days before it disappears.

Dean wants to talk to Sam about the body—he must’ve seen it—but he doesn’t because he’s waiting for Sam to say something first. An impossible thing. So he shoots arrows at things instead.

Brian had given Dean a high-powered, military-grade compound bow for his birthday, another one of his gifts that is a perk of his secret position in the military division of Geneticore. Dean’s mom pretends to her Mother’s Union friends that he works for a small research company. Not that it matters. Most people seem to be employed by Geneticore or one of its subsidiaries.

Dean practices with the bow all the time at the clearing until he is able to hit anything he targets absolutely dead on. He becomes obsessed with the synchronicity of it, the message relayed from his eyes to his brain to the anticipating muscles in his arms; the suspended, breathless moment before the arrow is unleashed; and the sound it makes powering itself through the resistant air and into the object of impact.

He even dreams about it. Sometimes he’s the arrow, everything a blur except for the target, the moment of impact an orgasmic oblivion.

That summer the temperatures hover above thirty degrees Celsius every day. The biopark is a sweaty jungle filled with biting insects. Everything irritates Dean and feels resistant to his presence. But it’s Sam that irritates him the most, his cool disregard for the heat and his indifference to Dean’s presence, the way he buries himself in textbooks, making notes in the margins that make no sense to Dean when he looks over his shoulder, always thinking, always distracted.

It starts out ordinarily enough, the afternoon that forever changes everything. They play a game of chess, shirtless because of the heat, sitting cross-legged on the ground underneath the tree house. Sam looks like an engraving Dean once saw in an old book of a young Native American warrior. He must have shot up at least four inches this past year, has lengthened into long, lean lines and hollowed cheekbones. Dean plays recklessly, irritated by his own incompetence and Sam’s superficial seriousness. It’s not like he doesn’t know Sam is wishing for a smarter opponent.

He loses quickly and catastrophically. Sam gives him an arched-eyebrow look after sweeping his Queen off the board, and Dean just gets up and stalks away to pick up his bow. It’s because Sam is a clone, of course, that he misses the nuances of social interaction. A real person would realize that losing occasionally is a necessary part of maintaining a friendship. Dean starts pounding arrows into a tree across the clearing, creating his own neat bulls-eye bristling with arrows. Thwack, thwack, thwack. One after the other.

He turns to see Sam leaning back against a tree obliviously reading a book. Uncontrolled anger bursts red hot through Dean’s chest. Without thinking, he picks up another arrow, fits it into the bow and releases it. It hits one of a pair of apples lying with some sandwiches just next to Sam, shattering it into pieces and splattering Sam and the book he was reading with pulp. Part of the apple with the arrow lodged in it rolls off to the side and lies there like an accusation.

Sam raises his eyes slowly from the book and takes his time wiping his face with the back of his hand, pretending to be unaware of the enormity of the situation. Dean’s heart feels like it’s going to jackhammer its way out of his chest. A few inches off and the razor-sharp metal tip of the arrow would have ripped into Sam’s flesh.

Sam looks at him steadily before wordlessly getting up and picking up the other apple. He stands up straight against the tree and carefully balances the apple on his head, aiming a challenging look at Dean across the clearing.

Dean raises his bow, the challenge immediately accepted, but allows a couple of hesitant seconds to set in and solidify. His hand shakes and sweat breaks out in hot beads on his face. He lowers the bow and breathes slowly in and out, biting his bottom lip. He feels hot enough to spontaneously ignite. Sam doesn’t move, calm and cool as a marble statue. Dean lifts the bow again, ignores the distraction of Sam’s face –the apple, a single, fixed object in his sightline.

It explodes into pieces as the arrow bursts through it and buries itself into the tree, quivering briefly just above Sam’s head.

Realizing he hasn’t been breathing for at least a minute, Dean gulps for air, light-headed from the lack of oxygen and shakily lowers the bow. Sam persists in reacting inappropriately to the situation. He gives Dean this little smirk and then suddenly takes off at a sprint across the clearing. At the edge, he turns and gives Dean a heated, inviting look over his shoulder before plunging into the forest.

Dean doesn’t think about it, just drops the bow and takes off after him.

He can hear Sam ahead of him crashing through the undergrowth. Branches slap and scratch his bare arms and chest, vines turn into twisted traps for his feet, but he runs on, barely noticing.

They’ve been running together the past few months since Dean joined the long distance running team at school. Clones can’t compete but a lot of them still train with the originals. Dean isn’t really all that interested in the competitive side of it but he likes running alongside Sam, just the two of them, the burning challenge of trying to keep up with him, the mental clearing, the physical exertion, the endorphin high. He feels intimately connected to Sam when they’re running together.

But this is different. He’s chasing Sam. They are separate, competitive entities. He feels predatory. Adrenalin surges through his body, his face burns with overheated blood and sweat pours from his skin.

He hears Sam veering left ahead of him, figures he’s trying to avoid the thorn-covered bushes growing alongside the river snaking through the park. He adjusts his course and speeds up, knows that if he pushes himself hard enough he can cut Sam off. His thigh muscles are on fire.

The trees clear a little and he can see Sam ahead of him. He puts every last reserve of energy he has into a final spurt that brings him up just behind Sam. He probably wouldn’t have caught him, he’s got nothing left to give and he thinks he may have burst a blood vessel in his head, except Sam turns to glance over his shoulder and stumbles over something in his way. Dean launches himself and tackles Sam around the waist. They go down in a tangle of limbs and hit the ground hard, the wind knocked out of them.

Dean holds on when Sam starts fiercely struggling. They’re both slippery with sweat and blood from where they’ve been scratched by branches as they’d madly raced through the forest. They roll over and over, pushing and shoving, their breathing harsh and animalistic. Dean finally manages to pin Sam to the ground, grins down at him and crows in victory. Sam sets his jaw and bucks violently, unseating him, and they roll over again. Sam locks his legs around Dean’s hips and Dean mindlessly thrusts against him. Sam makes this wounded noise and rocks his hips up.

And then they just stop, both of them realizing what’s going on. Their crotches are locked together and they’re both hard. Dean gasps, hides his head in Sam’s neck and blindly writhes against his body. They’re wrapped tightly together and are panting for breath, squirming against each other, desperate for something. Dean turns his head, closes his eyes against the expression on Sam’s face and locks his mouth onto Sam’s. Their mouths are so dry, their faces wet with sweat. Dean shoves his tongue into Sam’s mouth and Sam arches, body taut as a bow for a few seconds before he shudders against Dean, making desperate noises against his lips, fingers clenched around Dean’s biceps. Dean lifts up slightly, pushes his hand into his own shorts and squeezes his dick just once. Awareness disappears into a white flare of release.

When he can see again, he rolls off Sam and lies next to him, drinking in the heavy, muggy air until his breathing and heart-rate slow down. He turns his head. Sam has a stunned expression on his face as he stares up at the sky above them. There’s a wet mark on the front of his grey pants.

“You shouldn’t ignore me all the time. I can’t deal with it anymore.” It comes out sounding both wounded and belligerent. Dean hasn’t even begun to process what just happened, is reeling from shock, but underneath that he’s still feeling really angry, something that’s been there for years now.

Sam turns his head to the side and Dean swallows hard at the openness of his expression. “I never ignore you. I’m always aware of you. Where you are, what you’re doing and everything you say. And I think about you all the time when I’m not with you.”

Dean looks up at the glimpses of blue through the branches of the trees and lets that echo around in his head for a minute.

“Okay,” he says quietly. “Okay, that’s good.”

He doesn’t know what else to say.

**The time after the first time**

It was inevitable, of course. If Dean thinks back, retraces his way through the past few years: it was always leading them to this. He just couldn’t see it because he was in the middle of it, living it, and therefore blind to its inevitability.

Sex is a revelation for him. He knew it was going to be good. Of course. Jerking off feels good, therefore having sex with someone else will, by deduction, feel even better. It follows. What he isn’t expecting is the closeness of it, the sense of being connected to another person, to Sam.

Sam can’t hide away from him when they’re naked and touching each other. He can’t be guarded when he’s desperately whispering Dean’s name, holding onto him and opening himself up to him. Dean still doesn’t feel as if he’s close enough to Sam, as if he has reached the center of where Sam hides himself, but he’s nearer now, a whole lot nearer.

Sometimes he gets this strange sense, though, that whatever it is lying at the core of Sam’s being, whatever makes up the essence of who he is, it’s not the same as what lies inside himself or anyone else Dean’s ever known. It’s something different. Sam is not like other people. Maybe it’s the same with all the clones. Dean doesn’t know.

It’s tentative and nerve-wracking their first time in the tree house, nothing like the rough and clumsy coupling in the forest.

(As with all things, though, it got easier with practice.)

When Dean arrives at the clearing the day after the desperate chase in the forest, Sam is already in the tree house waiting for him, lying on the air-mattress that Dean always thinks of as belonging to him, as if Sam’s staking a claim of some sort. He’s shirtless in the summer heat, reading. Dean pauses in the doorway after climbing up the rope ladder and nervously bites his lip at the sight of Sam half-clothed and sprawled on the mattress.

“Do you want to read with me?”

The question hangs in the air between them, this weighted, coded thing.

“Yeah, okay,” Dean answers and strips off his t-shirt—no point in being the only one wearing all his clothes—and lies down next to Sam. “It’s been a while since we did that.” He thinks about it and realizes it’s been almost two years since they’d stopped reading together. “It’s not something really boring like quantum mechanics or something, though, is it?”

(At the time he’d been pretending to be casually oblivious to the charged, claustrophobic tension in the tree house, pretending he didn’t know what it looked like when Sam orgasmed. Years later, when they find each other again and they’re lying together in the dark one night talking about how it had all started, Dean tells Sam how nervous he’d been that day and Sam laughs and says, “You think I didn’t know, Dean?”)

Sam smiles. “No, Dean, it isn’t quantum mechanics.” His voice sounds breathless. Dean glances quickly at him and realizes they haven’t met each other’s eyes since he arrived.

Sam looks down quickly and starts to read, and Dean realizes after a couple of sentences that it’s the same story they had been reading just before the supervisor got killed at the institution. Sam’s reading from the exact point where they stopped before.

The hero is still in bed with the blue-skinned alien woman getting his dick sucked. It sounds kind of silly now, but the remembered excitement and desire from that day when they were so much younger hangs heavily over Dean. He can hear the amused embarrassment in Sam’s voice as he reads. Dean studiously avoids looking directly at Sam, lying on his back and staring at his own legs and feet and at Sam’s legs and feet next to his. Sam’s feet are long and tanned and slim. Dean’s look pale and square in comparison. Sam’s calf muscles are longer than his, his legs slightly hairier.

The hero finally manages to get out of bed to rejoin the rebel resistance. There’s some sort of aircraft skirmish going on between them and the patrician pilots of the ruling minority. Dean isn’t really listening. He’s decided that sci-fi is pretty far removed from reality and briefly wonders what happened to the Literature teacher who got arrested at school and what he would’ve gotten out of reading a book like this.

Mostly Dean’s just listening to the sound of Sam’s voice, rather than the words, watching the rise and fall of his chest out of the corner of his eye. They are breathing in time with each other. Only an inch of space separates them, not even that, because all the hair on Dean’s body feels statically charged, rising up and reaching out to lightly touch Sam’s skin.

Sam reaches down to briefly scratch his thigh and Dean just places his hand over Sam’s and holds it there.

Sam’s voice dies away. Dean squeezes his hand and Sam squeezes back. Their fingers tangle together. Both of them are looking down at their joined hands. It’s easier that way, not to meet each other’s eyes, to hold on tight without looking.

Eventually, Dean lets go and trails his hand across Sam’s stomach, from the ridge of one sharp hipbone across the flat plane of his belly, a finger catching in his bellybutton, across to the corresponding ridge of Sam’s other hipbone. Fascinated, he watches the way Sam’s stomach muscles tighten and flutter under his touch. Even more fascinating is the way the front of Sam’s grey pants starts to tent. He lowers his hand and strokes over the growing bulge under the thin fabric. Sam makes a choked off sound and his hips jerk. So Dean does it again.

Sam is breathing hard. Dean glances up quickly, takes in his parted lips and the red flags on his cheekbones that make him look like he’s got a fever, looking down again before Sam can meet his eyes. He takes a deep breath and inches his fingers under Sam’s waistband. Sam sucks his stomach in and holds his breath, his body tense. Dean strokes his thigh reassuringly and lifts himself up onto his elbow so he can lean over Sam’s body. He pushes his hand into Sam’s underwear and wraps his hand around his dick, surprised, impressed, really turned on—in that order—by how big he is, warm and hard, silky skin, sticky wetness at the end.

“Dean.”

The high, nervous note in Sam’s voice makes Dean stop immediately. He looks up. Sam’s eyes are wide, his pupils are blown and his bottom lip is chewed red.

Dean keeps his hand where it is and moves up the mattress. “Hey,” he says quietly, surprised by how calm he suddenly feels. “It’s okay.” He leans forward and presses his mouth to Sam’s, closes his hand tighter around Sam’s dick and starts gently jerking him off. Sam thrusts into his grip, opens his mouth to let Dean’s tongue in, making soft moaning sounds into his mouth. Their tongues tangle together and Dean shifts closer, drapes his leg over Sam’s and rubs himself against Sam’s hip.

Sam stiffens and arches his body. He starts repeating Dean’s name, choked-off, desperate repetitions. “Dean, Dean, Dean.” He’s clenching Dean’s arm. Clench and release, clench and release - a rhythm like a pulse. Dean shifts back a little so he can see Sam’s face. He grips tighter and speeds up. Sam grits his teeth, his eyes rolling back, body lifting off the mattress, stiff and on a knife-edge, before dropping off it and coming wet and so hot in Dean’s hand, his expression completely unguarded, lost in the moment. Dean is open-mouthed with wonder at it. Sam gives a final shudder and reaches down to stop the movement of Dean’s hand.

Letting go, Dean whispers, “Sorry,” even though there’s no need for him whisper. Sam’s eyelids are heavy and at half-mast as he stares back at Dean. He raises his hand, seems to forget what he was going to do to with it and clumsily pats the side of Dean’s head. His arm flops back behind him, boneless, his armpit exposed. Dean feels dizzy with the smell of Sam’s sweat and release. He reaches into his shorts with his wet hand, but, before he can do more than that, Sam grips his forearm. “Wait,” he says softly.

“Okay.” Dean pulls his hand out and lets it fall on the mattress between them, like it doesn’t belong to him. He’s both intensely aware of his own body and totally removed from it, as if he’s in an immersive virtual reality environment. The dusky orange light around them and the silence makes the world new and unreal. Sam’s face, so familiar, is so changed.

Sam sits up and pushes against Dean’s shoulder until he’s lying flat on his back. He runs his eyes down Dean’s body and Dean can feel it, heated and tangible against his skin. It makes him feel shy, but, because it doesn’t feel real, he’s able to lift his hips to push down his shorts so he’s naked and exposed to Sam’s gaze. Sam gives him another heavy-lidded look, shifts and moves lower. Dean parts his legs and Sam settles between them.

Sam’s mouth is a hot, moist cave that Dean disappears into, losing himself. With his eyes closed, he can only feel, physical sensation washing away the real world. Sam’s lips, his tongue, the soft suction, the light scrape of teeth. A warm breeze enters through the tree house doorway and whispers across Dean’s skin, bringing him partly back to himself, and he reaches down to card his fingers through Sam’s hair, cradles his head, feeling the heat of his scalp and the wetness of his sweat-soaked hair. Sam’s teeth lightly graze his sensitive flesh again and he shudders. His orgasm begins as a warm wave cresting inside him. He clutches at the back of Sam’s head until he sits up and takes Dean in his hand, stroking him through the drowning pleasure.

When Dean opens his eyes, Sam is still sitting between his legs, looking at him as if he has never seen him before. Dean reaches out, takes Sam’s hand and pulls him down next to him. He wraps his arms around Sam and holds him close.

Sam lets himself be held and a promise forms in Dean’s mind. He is never going to allow anything to take this away from him.

**Love is not love which bends with the remover (and other lies)**

If Dean had never sneaked Sam into his house that day, maybe things would have worked out differently.

As it is, though, that’s what he does. His mom and Brian go away for the weekend, and he talks Sam into sneaking into the Geneticore residential compound with him. He wants to show Sam where he lives, wants to see him in the light of the real world. Dean loves the clearing and the tree house—it is a place indelibly marked in his psyche—but he wants to eat lunch with Sam off real plates at a table where they’re not surrounded by prying eyes like at school. He wants to have Sam in his bed with him so he can remember what that’s like when he isn’t there, wants his sheets and pillow to smell like Sam.

It’s a bit easier at the school now. He and Sam openly hang out together. The clones make up about sixty per cent of the school’s student body. According to his mother, that percentage parallels the original/clone ratio in general society. Almost all the subsidiary staff: administrators, janitorial staff etc. are clones. Everybody’s used to their presence. It’s like they’ve always been there. But close relationships between originals and clones are not allowed—it’s an unspoken social rule understood by everyone—so everything is a pretense at casualness.

They’re mostly left alone by the other original kids. Dean already had a reputation for being a loose cannon and it’s solidified when he breaks an older kid’s arm for sarcastically suggesting that Sam is able to suck Dean’s dick and simultaneously complete his homework. It’s an over-reaction, of course—the kid wasn’t being serious. Brian had to pull some serious strings to get him out of that one. The kid’s dad is a Geneticore official but luckily Brian outranks him.

He feels split in two. The Dean who pretends that Sam is his running and study buddy, a utilitarian relationship based on Sam’s usefulness; and the other Dean, who spends entire afternoons naked in a living tree house lost in a mutual exploration of pleasure and desire with a boy he is in love with.

It’s easy enough getting Sam into the compound. Dean’s not very smart when it comes to academic, abstract thinking but he’s becoming really good at finding out things he shouldn’t know and at breaking rules that require a certain type of devious intelligence. Specifically, at hacking into computer systems and manipulating data. A couple of weeks ago he hacked into the school’s database just because he was bored one day and messed with the enrollment records, reassigning originals as clones and clones as originals. The school was crawling with Geneticore men for days. Dean was pretty hysterical during the investigation but by some miracle he had managed to cover his tracks well enough to get away with it. Apparently, criminality comes naturally to him. If his mother had known about it, she probably would have said something like: “like father, like son.”

It was eventually blamed on a resistance group. There are rumors of civil unrest and sabotage in other sectors but where Dean lives it’s pretty quiet most of the time. Although there was an incident a few months ago when a fanatical, lone gunman tried to assassinate a local Geneticore official. He got caught and a public execution was held outside the old town hall. Dean had wanted to go, both repulsed and fascinated by the idea of watching a man die, but his mother banned him from going, described it as an act of voyeuristic complicity in a spectacle of sacrilegious barbarism. Of course, the reason she had an issue with it was because the man was an original. She didn’t seem to have a problem with the mass recall and incineration of a batch of teenage clones that rioted in an institution the next sector over. The official line was that it was because ofa genetic abnormality (blamed on the lab they’d been created in) that led to uncharacteristically violent behavior.

To get Sam into the compound, Dean hacks into Brian’s home computer—over the past few years his stepdad has become increasingly lax about security when he’s at home, nothing like his early obsessive safety measures—and adds Sam to the visitor roster using the name of a boy in one of his classes whose I.D. card he steals. He carefully slices open the outer plastic cover of the card with a razor blade and replaces the boy’s photograph with one he takes of Sam, heats the plastic carefully to seal it again, and just hopes like hell the guards won’t take the extra precaution of a retinal scan.

On the day they do it, Dean’s astounded by the way Sam goes through this physical transformation as they pass through the checkpoint. His body language changes, just loosens up, and his expression becomes animated and open. He smiles and chats to Dean the whole time, barely glances at the guards as he hands over the I.D. card as if he’d been doing it for years. He’s mimicking original human behavior and it’s a faultless performance.

For some reason it turns Dean on so intensely that he’s dizzy with it, and he drags Sam up to his bedroom as soon as they make it through the front door of his house. Sam has this little smirk on his face as Dean pushes him onto his bed, like he knows exactly why Dean is so worked up. He allows Dean to strip off his clothes and to turn him over onto his stomach. Dean quickly removes his own clothes, takes a moment to admire the smooth lines of Sam’s back, the dip of his spine before it rises to the rounded muscle of his ass, perfect, like he came out of a mould, before he lies on top of Sam and whispers in his ear, “Can I do this?”

Sam bites his bottom lip and nods. Dean waits until he quietly says, “Yes, Dean.”

They’ve come close, but a combination of embarrassment, shyness and over-eagerness has prevented them from going all the way. Dean’s hands are shaking as he pulls out a bottle of massage oil from under his mattress. He’s been preparing for this in other ways too. Sam spreads his legs and Dean opens him up gently with his fingers—this they’ve done before.

When Sam is loose-boned, squirming against the sheet and making soft moaning sounds, Dean leans over Sam’s back again and starts gently nudging his hips forward. There’s an initial resistance, then a giving way and Dean’s halfway in. It’s too tight, too hot, and he’s concentrating too hard on not losing it before he can make it all the way in to notice that Sam has become stiff with tension. He pauses to take a deep breath, sweat drips from his nose, lands on Sam’s shoulder and he becomes aware of how absolutely still Sam is lying beneath him. In profile, he can see that Sam’s eyes are squeezed shut and that his jaw is clenched tight. His back is slippery with sweat.

Dean stops with a sharp intake of breath as guilt floods through him. He leans forward slowly to kiss Sam’s ear. “Okay,” he says. “It’s okay.” He pulls out gently, matching Sam’s grimace.

Dean lifts up and tugs at Sam’s shoulder until he rolls over. He looks upset and embarrassed. “Sorry,” he mumbles, looking up expectantly.

It’s like a hand reaches into Dean’s chest and squeezes his heart. “No, Sam, don’t be sorry. That’s just—No, just no. Shit, _I’m_ sorry.” He leans forward and kisses him, a soft pressing together of their lips.

Dean holds back, not wanting to overwhelm him, scared that he’d been too rough, too impatient and clumsy, but Sam seems to have other ideas. He opens his mouth and slips his tongue between Dean’s lips. Dean tilts his head and Sam tilts the other way and the kiss deepens. Sam grips the back of Dean’s head, short nails digging into his scalp, locks his legs over Dean’s and turns his head to bite his cheek, his jaw and his neck, something desperately edgy and hungry about the way he does it. It’s something new.

Dean can feel how Sam starts to harden again. He pulls away and sits up between Sam’s legs, ignores a desire to physically pat and reassure him, isn’t sure whether he would be doing it for Sam’s benefit or his own. He reaches for the oil again and dribbles some onto the palm of his hand. The sight of Sam’s unruly hair against his pillow makes him breathless with desire.

He takes Sam’s dick in his hand and starts stroking him, the slick of the oil easing the movement. Sam’s mouth drops open in a silent moan and he shivers. Dean watches the flush along his cheekbones deepen. He moves lower and pulls Sam’s leg up, rubs a finger against the entrance to his body, watches a matching flush spread across his chest and up his throat, and pushes inside.

Sam arches, reaches up to clutch the pillow and rubs his face against it.

(When they’re having that other conversation late at night and years later, Sam tells him that he’d never experienced the softness of a pillow before, that he’d heard of them but was pretending not to be surprised by the decadence of Dean’s bed, the size of it, the crispness of the white sheets, the comfort of his pillow. It sullies Dean’s own memories of that afternoon when Sam talks for the first time about the cots at the institution—rows of them, pillow-less and with matching threadbare blue blankets—until Sam wistfully says that that afternoon in Dean’s bed was a perfect memory for him, something he held onto when things got really rough afterwards. They lie tightly together as they talk in the dark, men with difficult pasts behind them and dangerous futures ahead of them, the legs of a military cot groaning beneath their combined weight, Dean’s bicep pillowing Sam’s head.)

Sam keeps his face twisted to the side against the pillow, his mouth open in a long gasp as he twitches and comes, pulsing in Dean’s hand and painting his stomach with white. The smell fills Dean’s nostrils. Something possessive and primal wakens and growls inside him. It always does that to him. Acting on instinct, he leans forward and licks up a drop next to Sam’s bellybutton. Expecting shock and disgust, he quickly looks up but Sam just gives him a lazy half-smile and cards his hand through Dean’s short hair.

A shiver runs down Dean’s spine. He twists onto his side, makes himself more comfortable between Sam’s legs and trails his fingers through the wet streaks across his stomach. He looks up again and there’s some sort of underlying permission now in Sam’s expression so he covers his fingers in it and reaches down to push them into Sam’s body. He’s pliant and relaxed, still slick with massage oil, and makes a soft sound of pleasure when Dean twists his fingers slightly. Dean watches his hand, astounded by the raw intimacy of what he’s doing.

He doesn’t want to stop, wants to see if he can get Sam all the way hard again, make him come again like this, but Sam reaches down and tugs at his shoulder.

“Come up here.”

Dean complies, crawls up Sam’s body, kisses and licks his skin clean on the way up. Sam wraps his arms and legs around Dean, hugs him closer, clingy in a way that he hasn’t really been before. “Kiss me, Dean.”

He doesn’t wait, pulls Dean’s head down and kisses him roughly, his tongue exploring Dean’s mouth, tasting himself on Dean’s tongue. He arches up and Dean gets the idea, angles his hips until he can feel the give of Sam’s flesh accepting him, encasing him in tight heat. Gentle, nudging movements until he’s all the way in, then faster thrusts of his hips, encouraged by Sam’s breathy moans. It’s so hard to hold on when his orgasm starts creeping up on him but he does, holds it at bay, desperate to prolong this for as long as he can, despite feeling like he’s going to come apart at the seams and just atomize into a haze of pleasure. He feels like the borders of where he ends and Sam begins have blurred, and then he’s not really aware of anything but the rush of his orgasm matched by Sam’s clenching release.

They lie next to each other afterwards in a post-orgasmic glow, feeling like they’re the only two people on earth, bonded by an experience millions of others have had before them and many more will have after they are long gone.

“Can I show you something?”

Sam nods and gives him a little smile. Dean’s pretty sure Sam would say yes to anything he suggested right now. Not bothering to put any clothes on, he gets up and climbs onto his desk, moves the ceiling board so he can reach up and pull down the box of his father’s things. He brings it over to the bed, smirking at the way Sam’s eyes are unconsciously riveted on his naked body.

He places the box on the bed and they sit cross-legged in front of it.

Sam listens with the grave, wide-eyed attention that the sharing of something like this demands as Dean takes out each object and explains its significance to him. Sam hangs onto every word of every memory and story. They remain entranced for hours by the magic and romanticism of dead and noble fathers.

Sam looks at him with astonishment, then sadness, when Dean shows him the sonogram. He lightly squeezes Dean’s arm, and Dean knows that Sam really gets what he means when he talks about this weird absence, an empty hole in his life that should be filled by his brother.

It’s late afternoon already when they remember their rumbling stomachs and go down to the kitchen to make sandwiches.

Sam pretends not to be awed by the house but Dean can see right through his cool demeanor. Without being condescending, he guides Sam through the rooms and explains how everything works. In a strange way, it’s like showing a traveler from another planet how human beings live. Sam has never been in a real house before; the institution is all he’s ever known.

They sit on high stools at the kitchen counter, eating enormous sandwiches filled with everything Dean could find in the fridge.

After they have finished eating, Sam gives Dean this tentative smile, looks really happy in a way that he rarely shows. Dean leans forward and kisses him on the mouth, wanting to pour all his love straight into him.

They’re sitting like that, kissing, both shirtless, one of Dean’s hands on Sam’s thigh, the other in the nape of his neck holding him close, when Dean’s mother and stepfather, unheard, walk into the kitchen.

Through a chance series of events—including a missed train connection and a misunderstanding that erupts into an argument—they have cancelled their trip and come home early.

Lost in Sam, the first Dean is aware of their presence is when his mother shrieks his name. He and Sam jump apart and for a moment all four of them are caught in this ridiculous tableau of open-mouthed shock before everything starts moving again, but it’s all in slow motion, that weird underwater feeling that comes from disbelief. His mother is shouting and moving across the room towards Sam, and for some reason Dean momentarily thinks she might attack him, so he steps in front of her. She just shoves him out of the way. Brian is also suddenly there and grabs Dean’s arm, holding him back.

She’s screeching things at Dean half over her shoulder as she grabs Sam’s arm, turns it over to expose the tattoo on his wrist, evidence for what she’s saying, her long nails digging into Sam’s skin. It’s hard to follow. Dean’s in shock and his ears are ringing and everything she says is in half sentences about how she knew he would do this to her and he’s just like his father and her friend Helen had told her he was getting too close to a clone at school but she never thought he’d go this far and how disgusting and perverted he is and that he’ll go to hell for this.

Sam is pale and still, his frightened eyes on Dean.

His mother is threatening to call the guards at the checkpoint, to call the institution and the school, and holds Sam’s arm up to check the tattooed numbers and letters on his wrist when it suddenly goes silent.

“Oh, Jesus Christ.”

The softly moaned words are startling in contrast to her hysteria.

“What is it, Mary?” Brian asks sharply.

“Oh, Jesus Christ.” She’s staring at Sam’s face, her mouth open. She drops his hand like it scalded her and takes a couple of steps back.

Brian lets go of Dean and goes over to her, puts his arm around her shoulders, asks her worriedly, “Tell me? What is it, honey?”

“They promised. They promised they wouldn’t clone him. Why did they lie?”

Brian stares at her in frowning blankness, then comprehension dawns and he gasps. “It’s—he’s—are you sure?”

His mother looks over at Dean. She’s chalk-white, wide-eyed and shaking, holding onto Brian’s shoulders as if she’s scared her legs might give way under her. “What have you done?”

Dean looks away from the accusation in her voice and eyes, moves over to protect Sam—he looks so alone and frightened, despite his closed expression—and to draw some comfort from him. He feels really scared, a cold sense of dread congealing in the pit of his stomach. Something terrible is happening here. He just doesn’t know exactly what it is.

“Don’t touch him, Dean!” Dean jerks his hand back and stands next to Sam with his arms hanging heavily at his sides. His mother turns to Brian. “Get that thing out of my house. Take him through the checkpoint. We have to make sure nobody finds out about this. Oh God, why is this happening? What are we going to do?” she wails.

Coming out of a stupor of shock, Dean begs, “Mom, please just listen—”

“Go to your room, Dean!”

Dean is seventeen years old and in love. The first stirrings of independence and a genuine rebellion against adult control spark inside him. “No, I won’t.”

Brian lifts his hands up in a placating gesture, like he can orchestrate calm. “Everybody just calm down. Dean, listen to your mother. Uh, you,” he inclines his head towards Sam, “come with me.”

Sam looks at Dean. It’s the first time Dean has ever seen him hesitate before obeying a direct instruction from an original.

“Mom, let me just explain.” Dean doesn’t know how he could possibly explain anything about this situation but the words just come out on their own, weak and hesitant, even to his own ears, and it’s in that moment he knows he has no hope of having any control over what happens next.

His mother’s voice drops to a low hiss. “If you don’t do what I say, Dean, and tell that soulless thing to go with Brian, I will call the guards and let them deal with this. If you want him to live, you will do what I say.”

Dean’s heart judders in his chest. He knows she means it. When she gets really angry, into a cold rage like she’s in right now, she will destroy everything around her to get her own way, regardless of the consequences.

“It’s okay, Sam. Go with Brian.” He wants to squeeze Sam’s arm to reassure him, but that’s impossible. Sam nods. His mask of clone obedience is firmly back in place. He lowers his eyes and follows Brian wordlessly out the kitchen. Dean watches his retreating back with longing and fear, some prescient part of himself hanging on to that final glimpse of his profile as Sam turns his head slightly at the door. The sound of the front door closing behind them is quiet and final.

“Mom—”

“Don’t even talk to me!” Her tight face twists into an ugly sneer. “They should have taken you instead. You’ve been nothing but trouble your whole life.”

She’s said stuff like that to him before, about him being a burden and more trouble than he is worth, but never with such cold, wounding finality. He’s too hurt by it to try and work out what she means by them taking him away instead.

“Mom!”

She turns her back on him and walks out of the kitchen. Dean stands there, feeling icy-cold, like his life just imploded in on itself. He’s in a black hole and doesn’t know how he’s going to climb out of it.

He makes his way heavily up the stairs to his room and lies down on his bed. It smells like Sam and sex. He’d cry if he could remember how to do that but he hasn’t cried since he was about fifteen. Immobile under a weight of despair, he lies there on his back, head flooded with emotion, until he finally manages to work through it and his brain kick-starts into thinking again.

They’ll run away, that’s what they’ll do. Sam will come with him. He doesn’t doubt that. They will need some money and maybe fake I.D.s and travel documents. He’ll need time to figure it out. Until then, he will just pretend remorse, fake a conversion. Sam will stay safe. They’ll publically ignore each other until Dean’s got all the details organized and then they will just disappear.

Relieved and vaguely elated, he goes downstairs to start the process. It needs to begin with him getting his mother on side, on convincing her that he has seen the error of his ways and wants to return to the family fold.

It’s dark already. None of the lights have been switched on. He walks through the house, past Brian’s study and pauses when the light from the computer screen catches his eye. There’s a photograph on the screen. Dean goes into the room and the image comes into focus. It’s Sam. His heart clenches in fear. He sits down behind the desk and looks at the photograph. It makes him smile briefly. Sam’s hair is combed flat and he’s wearing this disarmingly simple expression, like the camera caught him at an odd angle and captured him differently. Photographs can do that.

He reads the column of information next to the image. It doesn’t make any sense so he has to read it again, and again. Confused, he follows a link to another document, a birth certificate, information that seems to be about Sam’s original stored in the Geneticore database. He understands the information, the words, but it’s too impossible to be comprehensible.

And then a gear changes in his head, the fog of incomprehension lifts and everything shifts, like some massive, global earthquake just tilted the earth onto a new axis. He wheels the chair back and gasps in shock, feels like he’s going to be sick. Thick, salty saliva collects in his throat and he has to swallow hard. He stands up, wanting to rush to the toilet to throw up, but forgets what he was going to do by the time he’s up on his feet, dizzy and disoriented, looking frantically around the room. He thinks he’s going to pass out and grips the edge of the desk. He sits back down again, not even aware that he’s done it.

Dean has no idea how long he sits there, his brain trying to absorb everything and adjust to what he has just read. He becomes weirdly calm, an eye-of-the-storm tranquility, and goes back through all the information again, reading it closely and carefully, unaware of the way he’s biting the insides of his cheeks, copper in his mouth and cold, liquid metal running through his veins.

When he’s done, he looks up and notices that Brian is leaning against the doorjamb watching him. “Come into the living-room, Dean. Your mother needs to talk to you.” He sounds almost kind.

Dean nods his head and calmly follows him.

His mother is sitting on the couch, her face red and blotchy from crying, a tissue clutched in her hand. She watches him warily as he sits in a chair opposite her. Brian sits down next to her on the couch.

“So my brother’s alive.”

“Yes,” she says.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Brian answers the question for her. “Because that’s not how it works, Dean. It’s better to make a clean break. Adopted children start a new life somewhere else. They never know about their other family.”

“Stop looking at me like that,” his mother says. “It’s not my fault. All second children have to be reassigned. There aren’t enough new babies. He was given the best possible opportunities in life. We have to make sacrifices for the greater good of society.”

“You handed him over to a Geneticore executive?”

She clenches her jaw, her lips thinning.

“Were you paid?”

“Dean, that’s not fair,” Brian barks out.

Dean ignores him. Brian has never counted.

“You sit there judging me, but what about you, Dean? What were you doing with that empty vessel?” It’s the first time she has ever spoken to him like he’s actually a grown up. There is some sort of understood adult meaning in the way they’re looking at each other.

“Aren’t some of the clones bred for sex clubs? I heard you can even have sex with a clone of yourself or one of your parents. What’s a little unknowing brotherly incest in comparison with something like that?” Dean’s so angry he doesn’t care what he’s saying.

“Dean!” Brian looks shocked.

“You didn’t—” she seems incapable of finishing the sentence. “You didn’t actually—”

“No,” Dean lies.

“Good.” She makes an obvious sigh of relief, but Dean can see the lack of certainty in the back of her eyes. “Look,” she starts. It’s her conciliatory voice. “You were probably just confused, thought you were attracted to him, but of course you’re not. There’s probably some sort of connection, something genetically coded. But nobody needs to know. The clone won’t say anything.” She turns to Brian and places a hand on his knee. “It will be alright, won’t it?” It’s really irritating when she does that voice, wheedling and girly and manipulative.

Brian nods reassuringly and pats her hand. “It would be better if nobody else ever finds out about this. It won’t do anybody any good. We can get through this.”

His mother turns back to him. “See. It will be alright.”

She’s doing what she always does, brushing everything under the rug. Out of sight, out of mind. Dean hates her in that moment with a hatred that is absolute and pure. She chased his father away, sold his brother to the highest bidder (he saw the figure in the file), and now she has ruined the only thing that is important to him.

“It wasn’t real,” she says persuasively. “You’re not like that.”

“No, it wasn’t real,” he says mechanically, hating her.

“We should get some sleep,” Brian says, standing up. “We can talk tomorrow about what needs to be done about the clone. I’ve got work in the morning and you’ve got that meeting, honey.”

“Yes.” She stands up. “We’re all exhausted and emotional. We’ll deal with this tomorrow.”

She kisses Dean on the cheek and they have this moment of really seeing each other as they look away and surreptitiously glance back again. Her dislike and disappointment, and his hatred, solidified in that moment.

“Sleep tight, baby.”

“You too, Mom.”

Brian’s eyes flick uncertainly between them before he finally smiles, satisfied that they have been reconciled. People can convince themselves of anything.

**What is and what should never be**

Of course Dean doesn’t go to bed. That’s not who he is. Helpless against a burning, desperate urge, he sneaks back into Brian’s office and accesses the information he was looking at earlier. His brother lives eighty-five miles away in a sector called Lawrence. That blows his mind briefly. All these years and he was just eighty-five miles away.

It takes him six hours to bypass all the security systems on the national travel regulator to falsify a pass for him to get to Lawrence the next day.

It’s not hard to pretend to be sick the next morning when his mom wakes him up. His eyes are dry and gritty from a lack of sleep and he’s slightly feverish with nerves and excitement. She tells him to go back to sleep and says they’ll talk over dinner that night. She looks like she might drop a kiss on his forehead but thinks better of it and gives him an airy wave from the doorway of his bedroom.

As soon as he hears them leave, Dean jumps out of bed and pulls on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt. He quickly washes his face, brushes his teeth and flattens his hair with some water, wishing he had something to smooth it into some sort of style. In the kitchen, he drinks orange juice from a carton at the fridge and grabs some fruit on his way out the door.

He cycles to the station on his bike and locks it up in the shelter outside the front. The grey concrete of the building is imposing and non-descript. He used to sometimes hang out at the small park opposite the station when he was younger, watching the high-speed, armored trains pulling in and out, fascinated by the magical aura of possibility surrounding the place.

Forbidden adventure lies outside the sector’s electrified fences and the only way out is through that building.

It’s busy inside and security men are everywhere. Dean’s pulse is pounding in his ears and he has to keep wiping sweat off his face. Who knows what sort of trouble he could get in for what he’s doing right now? He passes through two checkpoints and a body-scanner, terrified that they’re somehow going to pick up on his nervousness through the pounding of his heart. But somehow he manages to end up on the train.

It takes exactly fifteen minutes to the next station. Lawrence. Surprised at the announcement, Dean quickly gets up and follows a handful of people out of the train, watches the way they slide their I.D. cards through the reader at the door and pretends not to be a kid who has never left the sector he was born in.

Lawrence looks a lot like home when he gets through the security in the station and out on to the street. He starts walking, pretending to know where he’s going until he really does know where he’s going, the map memorized from Brian’s computer safely stored in his head and turning into a visual reality of streets and buildings around him.

The gates of his brother’s school appear in front of him. Dean takes a deep breath. He made it. He really thought it was going to be whole lot harder. And then, as if on cue, his brother appears out of a building, a moving figure, familiar in profile, appearing and disappearing between the metal bars of the gate. Dean doesn’t think about it, just joins a group of students moving through the security check at the side entrance, grinning and nodding and pretending involvement in unheard conversations.

He separates from the group of students as they get through the gates, scanning the school grounds for that familiar figure. His brother is sitting casually on the lawn with a pretty girl in a short skirt, long blonde hair cascading over her shoulders.

Dean licks his dry lips and swallows hard. Even at this distance there’s something different about him. He looks identical to Sam but weirdly dissimilar. He’s definitely heavier and maybe taller. It probably comes down to a better lifestyle and diet. But it’s his posture too, the way he’s lounging back, his attention focused on the girl. It’s not something Dean has ever really thought about before but Sam is constantly aware of his environment, conscious of some possible threat in his periphery. His brother looks oblivious to everything around him, completely carefree.

It finally hits Dean: this is his actual flesh-and-blood brother.

His brother, whose clone Dean is in love with. The clone that was in Dean’s bed just yesterday. A day when everything still made sense. Thinking he might throw up, Dean leans forward with his hands on his knees. He feels simultaneously hot and cold, a clammy sweat oozing from his pores. He needs to take bigger breaths: in through his nose and out through his mouth. In and out. In and out.

“Hey, are you feeling alright?”

The voice is uncannily familiar, but again, there is something not right about the intonation, something off-center or just adjacent to the clear and definite delineation of Sam. Dean straightens quickly, meets his brother’s bewildered gaze and mutters something about not having breakfast, running in the heat etc. He backs away a couple of paces.

There’s a small, familiar frown etched between those eyebrows. “Maybe you should come and sit down with us in the shade. You look kind of pale.”

He would be the sort of person who treats a stranger with compassion.

“Yeah,” Dean agrees. “I should definitely do that.”

He follows his brother back to where the girl is waiting for them. “Hi,” she says with a friendly smile. She’s wearing one of those 20th century cartoon character t-shirts. “Are you okay? We thought you were about to pass out there. Do you want a drink?” Dean nods and she offers him a carton of juice, which he takes and swallows quickly. “I’m Jess and this is Sam.”

The name is a shock. Dean doesn’t know why but he thought his brother would have a different name, maybe something Biblical, like Adam, the first man. Adam One. Sam One and Sam Two. Some of the originals and their clones are numbered in that way. It takes a couple of beats before Dean realizes that he’s just standing there and staring at them. They’re looking back at him expectantly, awkward smiles wearing thin. He plasters a grin on his face and drops down to sit with them on the grass. Laughing, he tries for rueful self-mockery, “Sorry. I’m Dean and I’m seriously not normally this weird. Too much virtual reality porn last night. Thanks for the juice. I’m feeling okay now.”

The smiles become even more awkward. Porn definitely wasn’t a smart way into a conversation. “I’m kidding. I was studying. Trying to get into the Tech Access Exam, you know?”

The awkwardness eases. “Sam just got into the training center in the capital,” Jess says. Her hair glints in the sunlight. She reaches out and strokes his brother’s hand. The matching promissory rings on their fingers pick up the golden light filtering through the trees. It means they’ve been tested and they’re both fertile, promised to each other.

And this Sam, Sam One, is on his way to the very selective inner core of the Geneticore training facility in the capital. Dean has never even met anyone who has been selected. He wants to dislike both of them and the privileged, easy perfection of their lives, but it’s impossible. They look so happy. So uncomplicated.

Sam is blushing and smiling. “Jess, stop doing that. You can’t tell complete strangers that I got in.”

“Hey, that’s totally okay. Congratulations.” Dean reaches out to shake his hand. It’s more about wanting to have some physical contact with him than anything else.

His brother’s hand is warm and dry, his grasp strong without being competitive. In those few seconds that their hands are clasped together, Dean is cascaded with possibilities. His brother there when Dean first heard his dad had disappeared and he punched the inside of his cupboard door so hard he thought he might have broken his hand. His brother there all those times when his mom had been so cold or blankly sunken into her depression. His brother there when Sam had been so distant and cut off. Somebody to talk to and to be on his side.

Dean holds on for too long and Sam has to pull his hand away. “Are you sure you’re feeling okay, Dean?” He’s so warm and open and generous, his forehead furrowed in concern for somebody he has never even met before. Part of Dean knew this was how it would happen when he was hacking through the layers of the travel regulator, that he would love his brother instantly—how could he not—and that he would lose him again even in the moment that he found him.

“Yeah, Sam, I’m fine.”

Dean is so grateful that his response to his brother is nothing like the way he feels about Sam. It’s not there, that desperate physical desire. This is a different person. He wants to tell him that they’re brothers, to claim him, another Sam of his own, to not be altruistic, but it’s very difficult when he’s being presented with so much flushed and dimple-cheeked happiness. Telling him would only complicate his life and cause him pain. Dean can’t do that to him. It’s easier if he never knows that Dean—and all his attendant complications—even exists.

(How was he to know that Sam would die three years later in a strike on a Geneticore facility? One of thousands of lives lost during the civil war. The future is a cold and unknowable place.)

“That’s my mom.” Sam waves at an attractive blonde-haired woman talking to some other people at the gates. She smiles and waves back. “Do you want to meet up for lunch tomorrow, Dean?” He’s still wearing a little frown when he looks at him.

Jess laughingly says, “Careful, Sam, you’re in danger of being sociable. Don’t you have some studying to do?” She turns to Dean and whispers in mock conspiracy, “He neglects me all the time.”

Dean wants to commiserate. He knows how hard it is being in love with someone as smart as Sam.

Sam rolls his eyes and puts an arm around her shoulders. “She’s only saying that because she knows it’s completely impossible for me to ignore her.” She pouts prettily and Sam kisses the tip of her nose. “What would I do without you?”

“You’d crash and burn. Obviously.”

Dean watches them, desperately envious of their casual intimacy and shared clarity about the future.

“So, lunch tomorrow?” Sam gives Dean a tentative, hopeful half-smile. Jess glances at him. She seems amused and puzzled at his insistence.

Dean wants to say: It’s because there’s something about me. He knows that. He can sense the connection between us.

“Seriously, Dean, say yes. Sam’s actually a lot of fun when he’s not hidden in a book. Don’t be fooled by this dorky exterior.”

Dean joins in their laughter. “Sure, Sam. I’d like to meet you for lunch tomorrow.” Saying it out loud briefly makes it a real possibility.

Sam grins. “Great. I’ll meet you here at midday, okay?”

“Sure.”

“Bye, Dean. See you around.”

“Sure, Jess. Nice to meet you.”

As they walk away—Sam’s arm around Jess’ waist—Sam turns and gives Dean a little, self-conscious wave. Dean returns the gesture. When they get to Sam’s mom at the gates, she reaches up and ruffles his hair and kisses Jess’ cheek. They’re a snapshot of happiness, an alternative reality that Dean’s excluded from. He doesn’t belong here. The world they live in makes it impossible for him to have a relationship with his brother. Dean’s mother, his love for his own Sam, his brother’s happiness all make it impossible.

(Later, when he’s so tired of the fight, of loss and of washing blood from his hands, he remembers this moment, that there’s a reason for believing the world can be different and renewed, even if it’s born out of war and bloodshed and anguish.)

“Bye, Sam,” he says under his breath.

**The End: prologue**

Historians like to demarcate time into chapters, the neat waxing and waning of power: the Aztecs and the Romans, Communism and Capitalism, Buddha and Mohammed and Jesus. Great waves of thought and faith and colonization and conflict, this way and that way, the human population of the world caught in its churning currents.

Midway through the twenty-first century, the people of what was once known as North America found themselves at a crossroads of sorts. To the North and the South great walls separated them from the hungry hordes above and below. The ocean separated them from Nature’s frozen destruction of the eastern continent and Man’s nuclear destruction of the western continent. A network of missile launch sites dotted along the borders prevented outsiders getting through these barriers: a medieval fortification of a continent.

At its center, too, the continent of North America was divided. Pockets of privilege stood their ground in an increasingly wild and anarchic sea of angry dispossession.

History is a story, and stories require protagonists and antagonists. When the story was narrated later, through the filter of hindsight, the architecture of the great technological terror was assigned to a single man, a scientist, a man devoid of human emotion who envisioned a world of sedate and complacent clones that would repopulate the diseased and dying world to power the factories that fed the less-developed Far Northern and Southern continents and allow a life of ease and comfort for a small, select original human population.

But men with a clear vision are often confounded by the complexities and vicissitudes of human nature. Religion made a sudden resurgence and prejudice against the soulless clones created social conflict. There was the problem with mutation early on, and then the genetically modified clones were not as sedate and complacent as they were supposed to be, and to complicate things further, bleeding-heart originals rebelled against what they viewed as eugenics and the creation of a cloned slave class.

Civil war erupted. The rebellion lacked organizational structure and coherent leadership. But this was also its strength. Militarized cells operated autonomously under a single objective: to disrupt the network of Geneticore’s control, compound by compound and sector by sector. What would replace the current social system was not really their concern. Most of them were soldiers, not politicians. A long-term future is irrelevant when you could die tomorrow.

**Camp Chitaqua**

“Moral determinism is what got us into this mess in the first place. The nuclear family and the inviolability of marriage are products of social fear. A truly free society is one where there is no ownership. Love is not a commodity. Sex is not about staking claim to another person.”

Dean leans against the doorjamb and watches Cas philosophizing to his attentive female flock. From his lotus position on the floor, Cas glances up, notices him and smiles. To the women he says, “And now it’s time to prepare for the orgy, my sisters.”

The women get up and file out of the cabin. Some of them wear beatific, stoned expressions. One walks past Dean on the porch without even seeing him, stripping off her t-shirt as she walks by, trailing it from her fingertips along the floor and down the steps. The camp is awash with the rosy arrival of sundown. Dean watches the sinuous movement of her naked back and swaying hips, the way the light haloes her long hair.

“Beautiful, isn’t she?” Cas says, standing next to him.

“Yes.”

“Are you tempted to join us?”

Dean takes the joint Cas hands him, draws deeply as he watches the woman step up onto the porch of the cabin across from them. She takes off her jeans and stretches her arms above her, naked and facing the setting sun in pagan worship.

“Do you even believe half this crap you spout at them?”

“I believe in everything and nothing.”

Dean angrily flicks the joint away. He’s not in the mood for the Dalai-Yoda routine. “I’m not one of your handmaidens, Cas, don’t talk shit to me.”

“From your hostility, I’m guessing he wasn’t there?”

“No, he wasn’t there.”

“Have you actually considered the possibility that he’s dead, Dean? I mean really considered it?”

“He’s not dead.”

“Well, at least you believe in something.”

“Yeah, at least I believe in something.” Dean spits over the porch railing. “Or I’m just deluding myself out of guilt. He’s dead. They killed him four years ago because of me and now I’m chasing his ghost in penance.”

They’ve had this conversation before, both of them know it, but they follow its familiar pattern anyway.

“It wasn’t your fault, Dean. Even if you hadn’t gone to find the original Sam, there was nothing you could have done to prevent them from sending your Sam away. You couldn’t have known that your mother and step-father would act so quickly. You were powerless. We were all powerless and disenfranchised. It wasn’t a betrayal.”

“So why does it feel like I betrayed him? I was arrogant and stupid—”

Cas places his hand on Dean’s shoulder. “You were young.”

Dean abruptly shrugs it off. “I was stupid and careless! I should have known better than to put him in danger like that.” He takes a hip-flask out of the breast pocket of his surplus jacket, takes a swig and hands it over to Cas.

“It’s very old-world Catholicism, all this guilt you carry around with you. You should let it go.” Cas takes a swallow from the flask, grimaces at the burn and passes it back to Dean.

Dean screws the lid back on and puts it in his pocket. “I’m not Catholic and you’re not a priest. Not anymore. You can’t give me absolution.” Of course, that’s exactly what Cas does provide. Every hard decision, every enemy Dean kills or ally he sends to be killed, this is where he ends up, in confession with Cas.

“You’re a strong man, Dean. A leader. And you still believe. I envy you that sometimes.” Cas leans forward, his hands curled over the railing as he watches the sun disappear through the trees.

Dean bends and leans his elbows on the railing, watching Cas’ profile, the cloudiness in his eyes and the half-smile, a removed, artificial happiness that comes from being high. “If you got your fucking head out of all this tantric, stoned, Kama Sutra bullshit, you might learn to believe in something real yourself.”

“I believed once but it was all indoctrination and control. Everything was a lie.” Cas turns his head to face Dean. “If religion is the opium of the oppressed masses, I prefer the real deal. Do you want to smoke a pipe with me? I promise it will make all the pain and guilt just go away. Gone in an instant.” He gestures with his hand, fingers flicking something into nothing. “Poof.”

Dean sighs, stands back up and stretches out the kinks in his back. “No, I need a clear head for tomorrow. And so do you. You’re going on that supply run. I don’t care how hung-over and fucked out you are in the morning.”

Cas mock salutes him. “Never fear, oh fearless leader, me and my amphetamines will be at your disposal in the morning.”

Dean turns away and walks down the cabin’s steps. He says over his shoulder, “I’m going to have a drink with Castiel. Your clone is less cynical and more fun than you are.” He has no intention of drinking with Castiel but it’s a good way to get Cas going.

“I’m insulted. You know Castiel lacks my genetic predisposition for social wit and insouciance. He gets maudlin after a single drink. The only time he even came close to being fun was when I secretly fed him space cakes.”

Dean laughs, turning around on the path in front of the cabin and talking up to Cas on the porch, “You don’t need to be jealous and bitchy, Cas. You’ll always be number one. And don’t forget how many times your clone has saved your ass, and mine.”

“Yeah, well, talking about asses and sticks and sticks up asses,” Cas calls back.

“That doesn’t even make any—never mind.” Dean half-waves over his shoulder and walks away, shaking his head.

Risa and Castiel are waiting for him at his cabin. She’s sitting on the steps up to the porch, and he’s standing like a sentry with his back to her, not speaking. Castiel doesn’t do unnecessary small talk.

“Hello, Dean,” he says, and continues without any further preamble, “You should come with us. There is someone you need to meet.”

Dean raises his eyebrows, “Uh, some context, Castiel?”

Castiel frowns. “Context?”

Risa sighs and walks down the steps. “We ran into a G-Core squad on the supply run. We exchanged fire. Five of them went down before the others retreated. They had a hostage with them. He’s in the mess. He says he knows somebody you might like to get some intel on.”

Dean nods at Castiel, “See, that’s called context.” He asks Risa, “What information has he got?”

She shifts on her feet and avoids his eyes. “Maybe you should just talk to him yourself.”

It’s unusual for Risa to be cagey. She’s tough as hell, a military clone, and normally says it like it is. Dean waits her out. She rolls her eyes and folds her arms over her chest. “Okay, he says he knows your dad and that he was fighting with him near the capital.”

“My dad? That’s impossible. He died when I was a kid.”

Risa shrugs. “That’s what he says.”

“And you brought him here? Have you lost your mind? He’s a Geneticore spy.”

Castiel breaks in, “I wasn’t in favor of this course of action either, at first, but this man is a clone and his original is with the sector five unit. We know this to be true. He is one of us, Dean.”

Dean clenches his jaw, staring hard at them both. Risa arches her eyebrows and looks back defiantly. Castiel is patient and impassive.

“Okay,” Dean grinds out, turning on his heel and stalking towards the mess.

The guy is sitting at one of the trestle tables. He’s big, wide in the shoulders and has a bullet-shaped, shaved head. He’s got the word FREEDOM tattooed under his throat in a curved arch from one collarbone to the other. Two of Dean’s guys are at the door, both of them armed. They nod at him.

The other guy watches Dean warily as he crosses the room. Dean turns a chair around and straddles it, his arms resting on the back. “Who are you?” he asks quietly, eyes narrowed.

“Who are _you_?” the guy snarks back.

Without hesitation, Dean leaps up and rabbit punches him in the side of the neck, knocking him straight off his chair. There’s a surprised shuffle of boots behind Dean but nobody says anything. The guy writhes on the floor for a minute, groaning and clutching his neck. He looks murderously up at Dean, nostrils flared and mouth twisted into a snarl.

“Get up,” Dean commands. The guy staggers to his feet and sits back down on the chair, flexes his shoulders and rolls his neck. He’s tough, no doubting that. “I’ll ask you again. Who are you?”

“So you’re a hard-ass just like your daddy, Dean.”

The next punch lands on his cheek, whips his head back with the force off it but he manages to remain seated in the chair. Dean rubs his knuckles. The guy’s got steel not bone under his skin. He turns back to Dean, spits blood on the floor and rubs his jaw. Surprisingly, he just grins at Dean, his teeth streaked red.

“My name’s Reece and your father’s name’s John Winchester. He’s got this ridiculous retro fetish for 1960s rock music and black-and-white movies. He trained at the Geneticore military institute in the capital and was promised to a cute, fertile little blonde at the age of nineteen who turned out to be psychotic, manipulative bitch. Your birthday’s January 24th. Your brother Sam was born sixteen months later on May 2nd. Your mother sold him to a Geneticore exec and broke your dad’s heart. He joined the movement early on, and faked his death when you were twelve years old.”

All of that he could have found out by other, second-hand means, but not what he says next. It’s something Dean only ever told his dad.

“When you were five years old you used to get dressed under the bed-covers because your mom told you that Jesus was always watching you and you didn’t want him to see your little pee-pee.”

There’s a snort of laughter from Risa. Dean turns to the group behind him. He’d almost forgotten they were there. “Get out,” he says shortly. Typically, Castiel looks like he’s going to argue. If Cas is his confessor, then Castiel is his guardian angel. Dean’s been trying to get rid of both of them since he met them, but for some reason they continue watching out for him. “Out, Castiel,” he insists. He doesn’t need an audience for this.

“I’ll be outside the door.” And of course that’s exactly where Castiel will be, as long as it takes.

Dean goes over to the rusted freezer in the corner and pulls out two ice packs. He chucks one over to Reece and puts the other on his fist, pouring shots of moonshine one handed.

“You inspire loyalty in your people. Your dad would be proud.”

Dean goes back to the table, sits down and puts his feet up on another chair. He swallows the shot, places the glass on the table and holds the ice-pack firmly down over his hand. “Where is he?”

“Loyalty, Dean. It’s all we’ve got.”

Dean gives him a cool look. “You going to make me hit you again?”

Reece swallows the moonshine and hisses as it goes down. He sets the glass down and leans forward, elbows on his knees, hands loosely clasped together. “You can try. The first two were free. You’re going to have to work for the next one.” A drop of blood dribbles out the side of his mouth.

Dean puts his feet back down on the floor and leans forward so their faces are only a couple of inches apart. “There’s something you need to know about me, Reece. I’m very skilled at making people tell me what I want to know.”

Reece leans back in his chair and folds his arms, biceps bulging under his shirt. “I believe you. And that’s a valuable skill for a man to know when he’s at war. But you won’t do that.”

Dean raises his eyebrows. “Really? And why’s that?”

Reece looks at him steadily. “Because we’re on the same side and there’d be no nobility in that. You’re not broken enough yet.”

“I wouldn’t bet on it.

Reece huffs a cynical laugh. “I’ve seen broken men, Dean. Trust me when I say you’re not there yet. And if you’re half as strong as your dad, you’ll never end up there. You still have hope in your eyes. And as long as we’ve got that, we’ve still got our humanity.”

Dean stands up and gets the bottle of moonshine. He pours them another shot each and sits down again. Reece raises his glass, says, “To staying human.” Dean considers that for a moment, then nods and chucks it back.

“Jesus, how do you drink this rot-gut?” Reece shudders and wipes his mouth.

“If you’re desperate enough, you’ll drink anything.”

“True,” Reece agrees and notices Dean looking at the long, jagged scar on his wrist where his tracker chip has been removed. He rubs his fingers over it. “Fuckers are hard to get out, had to do it myself with a knife. Nearly bled to death. Got no feeling in two of my fingers.”

“How come you’re not with your original? Don’t you two get along?”

Reece shrugs. “We get along fine, but he’s his own man.”

“So he didn’t want you around, huh?”

Reece snorts and holds his glass out for another slug of the moonshine. Dean tops him up. “I’m stronger, smarter and meaner than him. He couldn’t handle it.”

“That’s got to hurt a little, being rejected by your own self.”

A slow smile stretches Reece’s lips. “Sure, it hurt. I spend years looking for him, finally find him and he doesn’t want anything to do with me. It’s like being rejected by your own mother.” He considers Dean for a long moment, that wry smile twisting his lips. “You’re a cool son of a bitch, Dean Winchester. I come along and tell you that the father you think has been dead for more than ten years is actually alive, and you sit there drinking with me and getting me to talk about my feelings.”

“Are you more or less likely to tell me what I want to know if you’re warm and loose with moonshine and sharing?”

Reece laughs, head back and chest shaking with it.

Dean continues, “But Plan B, noble or not, was still to torture the information out of you.”

Reece laughs even harder. “I like you, Dean. You’re a chip off the old block.” His expression sobers and he leans forward. “I’ll take you to him.”

Dean allows the little shiver of excitement. A lot of the time he banks everything down so hard and tight to survive, to keep going, that he’s just functioning on autopilot. It’s not that he actually, consciously maintains hope for anything—for victory and a new world or that he’ll eventually find Sam again—it’s just that fighting and believing things can be better are habits. But this is something else. It’s a real feeling. His dad is alive. A buried part of him remembers what it was like being a kid and desperately longing for his dad’s presence. Another, adult part of him that is wounded and betrayed by his dad’s survival wonders if he’ll be able to stop himself from busting the man’s nose if he ever meets him face-to-face.

“You need to know, though. Up North, it’s not like down here. Geneticore forces are holding strong up there, and there’s fierce fighting every day. People dying, every day. It’s not like this survivalist commune you got going down here. Everybody on the front is there to lay down their lives for the cause. But I’ll take you to him, if that’s what you want.”

Dean’s irritated by the implication that they’re some rag-tag, hillbilly outfit that hasn’t seen any real conflict, but he lets it go - every soldier thinks he’s got the bigger claim on who’s seen the worst of it. Something else is nagging at him more. “Tell me something: all this time, did he know where I was?”

Reece looks sympathetic. “He’s always kept tabs on you, yeah. Remembers both your birthdays every year by getting blind drunk too.”

“Son of a bitch!” First the discovery that his brother was living in the sector next-door for most of his life, and now this. Dean’s stomach burns. Between the moonshine and the stress, he’s going to give himself a fucking ulcer. He’s been lied to his entire life. “And it was just a coincidence that you got captured and we found you? Why did you say anything about my dad in the first place? Did you think it would get you some kind of leverage? Is this all part of some elaborate trap to get me into an ambush?”

Reece snorts at the suggestion he might be a decoy or a spy. “I’m on the level here, Dean. This is totally a weird coincidence, that’s all. He’s probably going to be pissed as hell at me for telling you anything. But fuck it. Look, I can’t speak for your dad, but you’ve got to understand: he made a choice all those years ago, and he chose the cause, which meant that he had to make sacrifices. A lot of people had to make hard decisions in the early days. He couldn’t be a father and a soldier. What Geneticore planned was genocide, a mass extermination of the original population, to be replaced by a slave class of passive clones. In the face of that, family, individuals, they don’t count.”

“No, I guess family doesn’t mean anything. Do you know my brother’s dead? He got killed in one of the first major strikes on the capital.”

“I know.”

Which means his dad knows. Dean furiously wonders if he even gives a shit. His whole middle section feels like it’s on fire, like the moonshine finally burned a hole through the lining of his stomach and it’s leaking through his body and burning like acid. “He was a college kid. A fucking innocent! An academic. He didn’t know what he was a part of. He wasn’t the enemy. He was supposed to get married and have kids.”

Reece slams his hand down on the table and roars, “We’re at war, Dean! Innocent people die!”

All that heat in Dean’s chest and belly just bursts into flames. Enraged at Reece’s callousness, he scrapes back his chair and charges at him, tackling him where he’s sitting. They go over backwards, the chair smashing into pieces under their combined weight as it hits the floor. They struggle violently—kicking, punching, knocking the table over, glass shattering on the floor—until Reece manages to flip Dean onto his back, his arm a steel bar over his throat. “Channel it,” he hisses in Dean’s face. “Channel all that rage at the right target and get revenge.”

He’s about to say something else when there’s a loud crack and his eyes widen before he collapses heavily to the side. Castiel is standing over them. He’s got a rifle in his hands, the butt turned forwards, and Reece is laid out cold on the floor.

“I thought you might need my assistance,” Castiel says when Dean blinks up at him in surprise.

**“Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection.” Arthur Schopenhauer**

Reece is surprisingly magnanimous towards them the next day considering the bumps and bruises he’s wearing. Dean does a supply run in the morning and they load a pickup in the afternoon with what they need for the long journey north: food, water, camping equipment and weapons. The three of them are ready by nightfall. There was no question that Castiel would accompany Dean on his pilgrimage to meet his father.

Cas likes to pretend he feels nothing but irritation for his clone. It’s a front, of course. They’re two sides of the same coin. As they’re leaving, he wraps his arms tightly around Castiel—who passively allows the embrace—calls him “brother” and tells him to watch his back. Castiel obviously feels that he has to give some parting advice in return and warns Cas not to mix barbiturates with amphetamines, which makes Cas roll his eyes and shake his head.

Dean gets a hug too and an open-mouthed kiss that he has to pull away from. Cas has no boundaries. It’s because he spent his whole life in a religious order living by rigid rules and now that he has lost his faith almost everything is permissible. Cas is one of the last great hedonists.

Dean discusses some final details with Risa. Who knows if they’ll even see each other again? Nothing is certain. They pull out of the camp as night descends and the first stars appear in the sky.

It takes them four days to make it to the northern sector.

Dean’s never been further north than the 35th parallel. The devastation is more acute the closer they get to the capital. It’s as if a great tide, a nuclear blast wave, radiated outwards from the capital and swallowed the surrounding area in fire and destruction and black smoke. Compounds, emptied of their inhabitants, are ruins of rubble and twisted metal. They pass long lines of refugees moving south: wary-eyed men, tired women and the occasional frightened child.

They have to abandon the pickup on the fourth day after they hit an IED on a ruined minor road through a valley surrounded on both sides by towering cliffs. By some miracle, the blast only just catches the front wheel and rolls the pickup into a shallow ditch. They’re unhurt but the front axle of the pickup is totaled. Reece tells them that the rebel camp isn’t that far from their position anyway, maybe a two-day hike, so they load as many provisions as they can carry in their backpacks and duck into the thick woodland next to the road.

The woods are unnaturally still. Most of the wildlife has been hunted for food, and it’s too easy to get ambushed in the thick cover of the trees, so the civilian population avoids places like this.

They are wary and silent, communicating only when it’s absolutely necessary, hiking for ten hours straight and camping in a clearing without a fire, sleeping in shifts. The next morning dawns humid and thunderous, the air charged with static. The storm breaks an hour after they set off. They keep walking through the downpour, glad for the waterproof ponchos they’d brought with them.

Dean had guessed Reece was a seriously tough bastard and that’s proved irrefutably when they’re attacked by a bunch of opportunistic marauders.

They are just coming over a steep and mud-slippery hill when it happens. A guy suddenly drops from a tree above them, straight onto Reece, who is walking at the front. He almost falls but rises up again and reaches behind him, grips the guy by the back of the neck and flips him over his shoulder. The guy yells as he sprawls on his back in the mud and Reece instantly brings his boot down—once on his throat, silencing him, and twice on his face, three crushing blows—before another big guy barrels into him from the thick brush to the side of the track. By then, Dean’s dealing with a wild-eyed, long-haired creature, who barks at him like a dog, barely human anymore, slashing at him with what looks like a short-sword, and Castiel is holding off a six foot mountain-man.

Dean pulls out the knife in his belt, feints a stabbing motion, slips the other way around his attacker, gets a grip on his hair and sticks him in the throat. The gush of blood is hot over his cold hands and the gurgling scream in his ear makes him shudder. He pulls the knife out and stabs again, in and out. He lets go and the body falls face-forward. He thinks about whether he should put his boot on the back of the neck, press the head down into the puddle of water, just to make sure. Castiel suddenly calls out a warning and he turns in time to stab another attacker in the stomach.

The thing about a knife fight is the brutal intimacy of it: the widened eyes and smell of fetid breath from an open mouth. Dean pulls the blade out and slips it between hard ribs into vulnerable organ muscle. The light fades from the wide eyes and the mouth closes on unsaid final words.

Dean and Castiel have been in enough close combat situations that they work together in instinctive orchestration. Castiel sidesteps an attack and Dean moves in for the kill. Dean maneuvers another attacker so Castiel can blindside him.

They wait back-to-back, but nobody else comes at them. It’s quiet. They turn in time to see Reece snap a final attacker’s neck. A quick wrench and the body drops to the ground. It’s done. Eight bodies litter the forest floor and blood swirls through the muddy rivulets. Reece looks over at them, a cold, closed expression on his face - the look of a killer. He physically has to shake himself free of it and blink a few times to refocus on them. He glances around and grins. “Not bad for a bunch of survivalists.” Dean doesn’t return the grin. He doesn’t need to look at Castiel next to him to know he’s not smiling either.

Afterwards, they hike for a couple of miles higher up into the mountains before huddling under an overhanging rock to brew a pot of coffee. “To staying human,” Dean says sarcastically, raising his cup.

“To staying alive, brother,” Reece rejoins and cheerfully clinks his cup against Dean’s.

It takes them another two hours to reach the vicinity of the rebel camp. They stop in a glade below a ridge and Reece goes on without them. The rebels don’t deal well with surprises or strangers.

Dean and Castiel take a seat on a fallen tree trunk and wait. It has stopped raining. Thin, golden fingers of sunlight poke through the trees. A humid, earthy smell rises from the drying forest floor.

“You seem nervous, Dean.”

Dean abandons his task of chipping away at a large rock by flicking smaller stones at it. He’d been trying to distract himself, and of course Castiel picked up on it. Castiel is an observer and constantly curious about what makes people tick on an emotional level. He’s often surprisingly attuned to peoples’ emotions.

“Yeah, guess I am.”

Castiel nods and looks away, satisfied that the verbal exchange has been completed. Confirmation of an observation and end of discussion. Cas has tried to teach Castiel the art of conversation, but he’s not a very good student. It’s soothing sometimes, though, being with someone who doesn’t find it necessary to constantly verbalize everything and fill in the natural silences between people with meaningless small-talk. Dean smiles slightly, watching Castiel scanning the tree-line. “I never asked you how long it took for you to track Cas down.”

“Two months and sixteen days.”

“Were you disappointed?”

Castiel frowns and cocks his head. “Disappointed?”

“Yeah, were you disappointed by him? Did you hope he’d be more than what he is?”

There’s no hesitation in interpreting what Dean meant by the question. “You’re afraid your father will be a disappointment.”

“No, I’m actually scared he’ll be everything I ever hoped for.”

“And therefore that you’ll be a disappointment to him?”

Dean grunts and smiles wryly, acknowledging the insight into his character.

“No, Dean, I wasn’t disappointed in my original. From the moment I met him, I loved him as if he were a part of me. I believe that we share the same soul. And it’s highly improbable that you will be a disappointment to your father. You have courage and a sense of justice. It makes people want to follow you. I admire you.”

Dean grins and flicks a stone at Castiel’s chest. “Are you flirting with me? Cas would be impressed.”

Castiel smiles and throws the stone back at Dean. It hits him on the thigh. “You know I don’t know how to flirt, but Cas would definitely be impressed you thought I was. I won’t mention it to him, though. I prefer not to encourage his fantasy about the three of us engaged in sexual acts together.”

Dean barks a laugh. “Yeah, he’s a perverted son of a bitch. But you’re right, he’s never disappointing.”

They hear a whistle from the top of the ridge and look up to see Reece gesturing for them to follow him.

There’s another guy with Reece. He’s tall and heavily muscled, has a shaved head and is dressed in fatigues. A thick, ugly scar twists up one side of his face and he’s got the same FREEDOM tattoo just below his throat. He looks from Dean to Castiel and back again. “You Dean?” he asks. When Dean nods, the guy looks him up and down. “Follow me,” he says. Dean gets the feeling he’s just been inspected and that he didn’t quite meet up to expectations.

The camp sits on top of the ridge and consists of a number of rundown buildings and military tents. There are various groups of people, mainly men, but a few women as well, doing training exercises, cleaning weapons and assembling explosive devices. Three or four guys are working on some open-hooded vehicles parked under a wooden structure covered in camouflage netting.

“Good luck,” Reece says, like Dean might need it, and smiles cryptically as if he’s in on some secret unknown to Dean before heading towards one of the tents.

Scarface silently leads Dean and Castiel towards a low building with a satellite dish on the roof. The south-facing wall is covered in bullet holes. A guy with a semi-automatic guards the entrance to the building. They are stripped of their weapons and thoroughly searched.

“You going to give me a hand-job while you’re at it?” Dean asks when Scarface searches his pockets and feels his crotch for anything he might have concealed there. It’s probably not the wisest thing to say to a guy who looks like he could rip your balls off and eat them raw for breakfast. He ignores Dean and continues the body-search. “He’s clean,” he says to the guard, who stands aside to let them in. Scarface gestures for Dean to enter a short, dark passageway. “We can get to the hand-jobs later, pretty boy,” he whispers in Dean’s ear as he steps into the entrance.

Walking down the passageway, Castiel says behind him, “Considering our position, perhaps it is unwise to antagonize the men with guns, Dean.”

“Point taken,” Dean replies.

The passageway opens up into a large room. There’s a long table strewn with maps in the middle of the room and maybe twelve chairs around it. Satellite communication equipment covers two tables lining the back wall. Very little natural light makes its way into the room from the small windows set high up on the walls facing east and west.

The room is empty except for a man standing at the other end of the table with his back to them in a position of quiet contemplation, head lowered and his hands clasped loosely behind him, a soldier at ease. Another figure sits on a chair against the far wall, his face in shadow.

Dean walks into the center of the room and waits. It’s a moment of silent anticipation. He doesn’t know what he’s expecting or feeling: anger, excitement, betrayal and nervousness, they’re all mixed up and tangled into an emotional ball that he can’t unravel. The man standing near the head of the table turns around and walks slowly towards him. Dean wasn’t sure if he would recognize him, but he does. Of course he looks older than the single photograph Dean owns of him - his dark beard is now filled with grey and deep lines mark his forehead, but otherwise it’s the same familiar face Dean used to spend hours staring at when he was a kid.

His dad smiles tentatively and Dean realizes each of them is as nervous as the other. It makes his anger and resentment dissipate a little.

“Dad.”

“Dean.”

His dad is the one to close the distance between them and pull him into a hard, fierce hug. He steps back and smiles again, his hand on Dean’s shoulder. “Oh, you grew up well, Dean. Look at you.”

Dean’s clothes are mud-and-blood-streaked, he hasn’t shaved in four days, he’s exhausted and he smells like hell. Only a soldier could look at him with approval.

“Reece tells me you really know how to handle yourself and I’ve heard good things about the southern resistance.”

Something warm starts to flower inside Dean. He doesn’t recognize it at first because pride is not something he feels very often. He has no immunity to his father’s praise.

(Dean never builds up any resistance to the need for his father’s approval. Forever mythologized, John Winchester epitomizes everything Dean always thinks he should be and never quite matches up to. It’s pretty much sealed in that moment—as it is for many young recruits when they first meet this legendary general of the resistance—Dean would willingly follow his father into the mouth of hell. He almost does in the battles that are to come. He never really recovers when his dad is killed. For real this time. He spends a night’s dry-eyed vigil next to the body, trying to convince himself of it, and lights the funeral pyre himself.)

“We have so much to talk about, Dean. I don’t even know where to start.”

“You could start by explaining to me why you didn’t let me know that you were still alive.”

His dad’s jaw tightens. Dean doesn’t know whether it’s out of pain or anger or guilt. He can’t read him because he’s a total stranger.

His dad sighs and gestures towards one of the chairs. “Let’s sit down.”

Dean remembers Castiel. “This is Castiel. He’s—” Dean doesn’t know how to describe Castiel’s position in his life. Their relationship is hard for him to define. Lieutenant sounds pretentious, brother-in-arms sounds corny and to say Castiel is a friend would be a ridiculous understatement, so instead he says, “I trust him with my life.”

The two men nod at each other.

“I will wait for you outside, Dean.”

After Castiel has left the room, his father gestures towards the chair again. Dean glances with irritation at the still figure sitting in the shadows. He guesses the guy is some kind of bodyguard, but there’s no reason for his presence. It’s not like Dean is a threat to his dad. He sits down at the table and his dad takes a seat opposite him, his hands clasped together on the table. He leans forward and says, “None of this will be any comfort to you, and I’m sorry about that. I had to leave because they were getting close to finding me out. Saying goodbye to you, even though you didn’t know I was doing that, was the single hardest thing I have ever had to do. And believe me, Dean, when I tell you I’ve been forced to make some very difficult decisions.”

“I’m not talking about back then. I get it. I’m talking about now. I’m talking about after the war broke out and you knew where I was, that I had joined the resistance.”

His dad watches him steadily. “Nothing has changed,” he says quietly.

Dean’s voice rises angrily, “What do you mean nothing’s changed? We’re on the same side. We’re fighting for the same cause. Why the hell shouldn’t we do it together?”

“I don’t want you here, Dean. Reece had no right to tell you.”

“Fuck you,” Dean says between gritted teeth.

His dad’s eyebrows rise in surprise. Dean guesses few people have the balls to talk to him like that.

“I won’t send you out there to be killed, Dean. I won’t. I’ve sacrificed enough. When I heard about your brother—I—” He grimaces, teeth bared and frowning lines cutting into his forehead and around his eyes. Looking like that, he ages about ten years. He turns his head slightly as if he’s waiting for something.

Dean glances over his dad’s shoulder at the figure sitting mannequin-still behind him.

His dad waits a couple of silent seconds before facing Dean again. “I didn’t get the chance to know either of my boys. I will fight to make sure you have a chance for a different kind of life. But I can’t afford the luxury of having you around right now, and while I hope to make it all the way through to the end, it’s no certainty. Men like me? We’ve got death sentences hanging over us. There’s no point in us trying to build a relationship. I can’t be a father to you.”

“You’ve got a pretty major martyr complex going on there, you know that?”

His dad throws back his head and laughs. He looks at Dean fondly, “Oh, you have grown up well, Dean. You’re smart, bold and idealistic.”

Dean refuses to be side-tracked. He leans forward. “I am not going anywhere. I should be at your side.” He punctuates each word with his finger on the table.

“I can make you leave, Dean. You don’t get to choose.” That quiet tone has an authoritarian note to it now.

Dean recognizes that this is somebody who is used to calling the shots, somebody you don’t cross lightly, but he doesn’t care. “Like I said, I’m not going anywhere. I’m done having my decisions made for me. I’m a grown man. I do get to choose.”

His dad sighs and shakes his head. “You’re stubborn too.”

“I hear it’s hereditary.”

His dad smiles at him. “I’m too tired to argue right now. I’ve had about five hours sleep in the last three days. I need to get some shut-eye. We’ll talk some more later.” Again, he turns his head, listening, waiting for something from the seated figure behind him.

Dean cranes his head to see past him and the guy in the shadows eventually gets to his feet. Standing up, he’s seriously tall. He hesitates, a broad-shouldered shadow against the wall before stepping forward into the light.

There are emotions that Dean just doesn’t really experience anymore. Surprise, shock, love, elated happiness, and to some extent fear, are feelings he associates with his youth. He has largely become numbed to them as an adult.

Physiologically, shock causes the release of adrenalin that triggers an increase in heart rate and breathing. Blood flow increases, muscles tense and sweat glands go into over-drive. Dean is aware that this is what is happening to his body. His cerebral cortex has shut down and his animal brain is sending all these wild signals to his nervous system. Heat rushes into his face, his heart jack-hammers against his ribs—Boom! Boom! Boom!—and his breathing shortens until he starts to feel lightheaded.

But part of the reason he doesn’t fully experience shock or fear anymore is that he has strategies for dealing with them. He can will himself into a state of calm, concentrating on slowing down the beating of his heart and breathing evenly. In and out. In and out. In and out.

“Hello, Dean.”

Dean’s mouth is still dry, so his voice comes out a little choked, but he’s mostly got himself under control. “Sam.”

Another single exchange of names, the simplicity of uttering a magic word that differentiates one individual from another. Sam Two. He’s physically so different, tall and solidly muscled. A grown man.

Sam pauses a few feet away from him and Dean stands up to face him. He hears his dad getting to his feet as well. They’re positioned like some triangular stand-off.

Dean grips the back of the chair he was sitting on. “I guess I shouldn’t even be shocked at this point, right? My brother, who supposedly died at childbirth, was alive and living practically next door to me for years, but now he’s dead.” He looks at his dad. “My dad was dead. But hang on, no, he really wasn’t.” He turns to Sam again. “I haven’t seen you in over four years, Sam. For all I knew, you were actually dead. But here you are, with my dad, who was supposed to be dead. Did I mention that? It’s like some fucking cosmic joke. What’s next? I’m the one who’s actually dead and all this is just some trippy afterlife experience?”

His dad’s expression is sympathetic. Sam stares silently at him, his face unreadable.

“How long have you been here with him?” His question is met with silence. “How long, Sam?”

Dean’s dad answers for Sam. “Three years.”

Anger is the one emotion Dean struggles most to control. Without thinking, he pushes aside the chair, steps forward and just lashes out, punching Sam hard on the cheek. Sam staggers back, his head turned to the side, hair covering his face. When he straightens to look at Dean again, he’s holding his jaw and his bottom lip is smeared with blood. “I don’t know why you think I deserved that,” he says coldly, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Three years, Sam! Three years you’ve been with my dad, knowing where I was and you don’t come looking for me?”

His dad comes around the table and places a firm hand on his shoulder. “Calm down, Dean.”

Dean shakes it off. “I’ve been out there on my own, alone, and my family doesn’t even try to find me? Don’t tell me to calm down.”

Sam frowns. “Alone? I thought you were with someone.”

“What are you talking about?”

His dad responds, “We got told you had a partner, a man that you were… with.” When Dean looks at him in complete bewilderment, he continues, “Somebody who used to be a priest.”

“Do you mean Cas?”

“Yeah, we were told the two of you had been together for years. That you were lovers.”

“What? That’s not true. I mean there was that one time—” Dean obeys the little internal voice that instructs him to stop talking. They do not need to know about that one time when he was stoned out of his mind and ended up in Cas’ bed. “Cas is a friend. That’s all. Him and Castiel, who’s his clone, have saved my ass a bunch of times. And I guess I’ve done it for them too. That kind of thing creates a bond.”

Sam and Dean’s dad exchange a look that Dean can’t decode. There’s clearly some silent communication taking place between them. Sam looks away first.

“I’ve been looking for you, Sam. For years I’ve been searching for you.” Dean can’t keep the note of wounded betrayal out of his voice.

Sam frowns again. “Why?”

“What do you mean why? What kind of question is that? Because you were my best friend. Because you’re my brother’s clone. Because—” he leaves that thought unsaid too. He can’t voice his feelings for Sam in front of his dad.

“I thought you didn’t want to see me again, not after what happened between us and you found out about your brother.”

Dean glances sharply at his dad, who looks back at him without surprise. He knows, Dean realizes with a shock. He searches his dad’s expression for judgmental disgust, but if it’s there, he can’t see it.

“Yeah, Dean, I know,” his dad answers the unasked question. “Sam told me.” He sighs heavily and rakes his fingers through his hair. “It’s not ideal, not by a long shot, but I’ve made my peace with it. I guess you could argue there’s nothing morally wrong with it because Sam is not your actual brother. He’s genetically modified and the sum of very different experiences. Of course that does sound a lot like moral relativism, but then we are all very tired of having hypocritical pseudo-religious dogma shoved down our throats. What your mother did to Sam wasn’t right.”

Dean starts at that. What about what was done to him?

“She always used religious morality in a way that suited her. As a society, there’s a lot of complex stuff we’re going to have to work out about cloned people after we win the war.” His dad glances between him and Sam. “Anyway, you didn’t know at the time what you were doing.”

Sam meets Dean’s eyes. “No,” he says, “we didn’t know _at the time_.”

Dean was always prepared for this: that he would find Sam, only to be rejected by him. He thinks he’s reading that in Sam’s comment and the expression on his face right now. They didn’t know at the time but now they do, and maybe Dean should be thinking the same way, but God help him, he doesn’t. He just wants to reach out and touch Sam and strip him naked to see if his body is really as changed as it appears to be in clothes. Dean’s need and desire haven’t been diminished by knowledge or time.

His dad rubs the back of his neck.

“You should get some sleep,” Sam says to him. Sam still presents himself like a blank slate, but Dean thinks he can detect an undertone of concern. That makes a nasty feeling of jealousy worm through his gut. They know each other. They have fought together. They have a relationship Dean is excluded from, and that is really unfair.

“We first need to iron out some technicalities with the next mission.” To Dean his father says, “You look tired too, Dean. Why don’t you clean up and get some rest? One of my men will show you where you can do that.”

And just like that he’s being dismissed. “Yeah, sure,” he replies curtly.

Sam gives him a shrewd look and a small smile plays around the corners of his mouth as if he knows precisely what Dean’s feeling. There’s no callousness in it, just amusement, as if something about Dean’s character has just been reaffirmed in his mind.

“Come on then.” John briefly squeezes his shoulder and leads the way out of the room.

“See you later, Dean.” There’s an odd note in that remark that makes Dean pause, but Sam has already turned to the table and is studying one of the maps.

Castiel is standing patiently outside. His dad briefly speaks to Scarface, who is sitting on an upturned crate and smoking, before coming back to Dean and studying his face carefully. “It’s good to see you, Dean. I’ve got to be honest, I was pissed at Reece, but at the same time I was relieved the decision had been taken out of my hands. It’s selfish of me, but I’m really glad you’re here.”

Dean wants to say again that he’s not going anywhere but Sam’s presence here complicates everything, so he just nods. His dad gives him a quick smile before re-entering the building.

Scarface shows them where to wash up and then leads them to a tent that’s got six military cots in it. Dean is so keyed up he thinks there’s no way he can go to sleep but he’s proved wrong. It’s lights out as soon as his head hits the pillow.

It’s dark outside when he wakes up again. There’s no sign of Castiel. He gets up and pushes aside the flap of the tent. The camp is transformed by nightfall. All the tents around Dean are dark and silent but he can see shadowy guards visible in the tree-line and there’s noise and laughter coming from the other end of the camp. He heads towards it.

Meat is roasting on barbeque grills over metal drums that have been cut in half to sit horizontally on steel legs. About a dozen folding tables are filled with talking soldiers. Dean weaves his way through the tables looking for Castiel or his dad. Somebody grabs his wrist as he walks by and he looks down to see Scarface leering up at him. “There’s a seat for you right here next to me, pretty boy.” He pats the seat next to him. “I didn’t want you to think I’d forgotten about that hand-job I owe you.” There’s some sniggering and cat-calling from the other soldiers at the table.

Before Dean can tell Scarface to go fuck himself, a voice says, “That’s okay, Dean already has a date for tonight and won’t need your services.” There’s more sniggering from around the table. Dean clenches his jaw in irritation but follows Sam as he walks away.

“Making friends so quickly, Dean?” Sam asks, heading towards a table where his dad is in conversation with Castiel.

“Fuck you, Sam.” Dean’s not sure how to deal with this older, harder version of the kid he used to know. He’s unsettled by his self-assurance and the latent strength in the way he moves and holds himself.

Sam stops and turns around. “Is that an invitation?” Dean’s heart stutters a little at the heated words combined with Sam’s typically neutral expression. Sam leans forward and speaks in his ear, the warmth of his breath raising goose-bumps down Dean’s neck. “We’re pretty literal around here. If I were you, I wouldn’t be offering myself to everyone you meet. Somebody might take you up on it.”

Dean realizes his mouth is hanging open and he snaps his teeth together. The son of a bitch. It’s been a really long time since anybody made him feel this awkward. He might even be blushing. But it’s not in Dean’s nature to let anybody get away with saying something like that to him. “Big words, Sammy. The way I remember it, you liked it the other way round, more of a receiver than a giver.”

Dean’s surprised he can still read Sam so well: the barely perceptible shift in his expression that gives away an emotional reaction. Dean definitely won that point. He brushes past Sam and takes a seat opposite Castiel and his dad.

“You alright, Dean?” his dad asks.

“Yeah,” Dean answers and pulls off a chunk of bread from a loaf on the table. “Sam and me were just reminiscing. Seriously, you should have seen him, he was the dorkiest kid. Who would’ve thought he was going to grow up into robosoldier over here.” The bread’s not half bad, a bit dense but at least it’s still warm.

Sam has sat down next to him. “Dean’s having some trouble getting his head around the idea that things change and some people actually grow up. When we were kids, he was really competitive, always had something to prove.”

“He’s just saying that because I used to kick his ass at everything.”

Castiel and Dean’s dad’s eyes are bouncing from him to Sam and back again. Castiel’s eyebrows are raised and he has a quizzical expression on his face.

“Of course Dean had the advantage of age and size. Not that it ever made any difference. He was still always out to beat me at everything.”

They’ve been aiming their remarks across the table but now they turn to face each other. Sam has a light flush along his cheekbones that Dean would think was really attractive if he wasn’t so irritated.

“Oh sure, Sam, like you didn’t really enjoy annihilating me at chess whenever you could?”

“There’s no enjoyment in beating a weaker opponent. I’d let you win sometimes just so I didn’t have to put up with your wounded ego and sulking.”

“Oh, you son of a—”

Dean’s interrupted by a snort of laughter. His dad is grinning at them. Dean doesn’t know why the hell Castiel looks so amused too, if the slight tightening of his lips counts as amusement. “Now, now, boys. No bickering at the table.”

“Sam.” The four of them look up. There’s a guy standing next to the table with a rifle slung over his shoulder. “Can I talk to you?”

“Yeah, sure.” Sam gets to his feet. Looking down at Dean, he says quietly, “Things change. You don’t have the size advantage anymore. I’m going to prove that to you.”

Dean pops another piece of bread in his mouth and talks with his mouth full, “Any time, any place, Sammy.”

“Don’t call me that. My name’s Sam.”

With narrowed eyes, Dean watches Sam walk away. He hasn’t seen him in four years and the first thing he does is try to get into pissing contest with him? Fuck that shit. His whole life he’s been running after Sam and pining for him. If he wants to get into something, Dean’s ready for it. He could totally still take him, despite his height and all those muscles. What the fuck is the matter with Sam anyway? Not all the clones are so emotionally detached. (Castiel oesn’t count.) After everything that happened between them, Sam didn’t even once consider trying to find him. What kind of person thinks like that? It’s unnatural. If he’s honet, though, the person with the real problem is Dean himself. What kind of man falls irreversibly in love with his brother’s clone and then becomes incapable of thinking about anybody else in the same way? He’s masochist and a freak.

Dean sighs deeply and turns back to the table. His dad and Castiel are wearing identical expressions of amused curiosity. Dean guesses his face was revealing more of his thoughts than he meant to. “What?” he asks Castiel defensively.

“Nothing, Dean. It’s just I have never seen you so… boyish before. It’s… sweet.”

Dean groans and shoves another piece of bread in his mouth.

**Sex and Violence**

They eat and then his dad brings out a bottle of whiskey, and not some home-brewed stuff, the real deal. Dean makes an obscene noise of pure pleasure when he takes his first swallow of the warming amber in his cup. The smoky heat runs down his throat like silk. “Jesus, where did you get this from?”

His dad smiles. “I have my sources.”

Castiel looks serious. “I have never understood this desire for inebriation.” He turns to Dean’s dad, “I worry about my original. He’s very self-indulgent when it comes to drugs and alcohol.”

Cas was right about Castiel. He’s only had a single shot of whiskey and he’s already maudlin.

“These are hard times,” Dean’s dad replies. “We do what we can to keep going.”

Suddenly there’s a loud whoop and the sound of commotion towards the bottom end of the camp. Dean looks around and realizes they are alone amongst the empty tables. “What’s going on?”

His dad grins and stands up. “That’d be the evening’s entertainment, gentlemen. Come with me.” Dean and Castiel get up and follow him.

As they come around the side of the building they’d been in earlier, they see a makeshift boxing ring: a flattened area of ground marked out by four wooden posts with a low-hanging rope between them. A whooping crowd surrounds it and two guys are beating the shit out of each other in the center. Gas lanterns hang from the trees, creating flickering shadows. Sweat gleams on the fighters. They are bare-foot and stripped to the waist, wearing battered, old-fashioned boxing gloves. One of them is Sam.

A hot shiver runs up Dean’s back and his breathing shallows. Sam always had that latent potential for strength and height when he was younger, but Jesus, he’s something else now: sharply delineated muscle and sinew under smooth, shining skin, his hair dark with sweat and clinging to his neck, and his expression focused and calculating. Dean swallows hard.

Sam’s attention wavers when he catches Dean’s gaze. His opponent takes advantage of his lack of concentration and lands a hard right hook on his cheek. Sam’s head and body twist sideways with the force of it. Dean flinches in sympathy. Sam recovers and shakes his head to clear it, refocuses and lashes out with a punishing left, again and again. The other guy staggers back and Sam follows him, kneeing hm in the flank. He falls and Sam goes down with him, gloved hand on his neck and knee in his side, holding him down until the guy taps the ground in a signal of surrender. The crowd around the ring whoops and hollers.

Sam reaches down and helps the guy up. He sways on his feet so Sam holds onto him until he steadies. Lowering his head, he talks quietly in the guy’s ear until he grins, pushes Sam away and lands a light punch on his shoulder. Another guy comes over and helps Sam’s opponent remove his gloves. He staggers out of the ring, past Dean, saying, “Jesus Christ, he’s fucking machine, man,” to the guy next to him, who is holding his arm and offering him a plastic cup.

Sam looks over at Dean and raises his eyebrows.

Scarface is standing in front of Dean. He turns around with a smirk. “You’re up, pretty boy. Don’t make the mistake of thinking he’s been slowed down by one round. He’s just warming up.”

Dean breathes in a deep lungful of air. Fuck it, this is what he wanted, right? He strips off his shirt and flexes his shoulders, rolls hi neck from side to side to loosen up. He leans over and unlaces his boots, toes them off when he straightens again.

“Here,” his dad says nd offers him a shot of whiskey. Dean nods and drains it. His dad grins. “Watch out for that long reach of his. Go low for the kidneys. And he’s got a big bruise on his left thigh from a couple of days ago. Go for that, it might slow him up a bit.”

“Thanks, Dad,” he says, surprised.

His dad grins again. “Don’t thank me. You need all the help you can get. Sam is formidable in the ring.”

Dean’s heart sinks. What has he let himself in for?

“Fight well, Dean.” Castiel pats him encouragingly on the shoulder. “You are fast, strong and astute. As long as you don’t allow emotion to cloud your thinking, he won’t stand a chance.”

Dean nods, flexes his hands and pops his knuckles. Right, no emotion, just focus and control. No problem.

A short, thickset guy helps Dean put on the gloves. “Watch out for his left hook. It comes out of fucking nowhere at you.”

Dean’s getting really tired of all this well-meaning advice.

He steps over the rope and into the ring. The ground is cool under his bare feet and a light evening breeze caresses his skin. Sam watches him, head slightly lowered and eyes hooded. They circle each other, fists up. The noise and movement outside the ring drowns and blurs. It’s just him and Sam, just this patch of ground, everything else drops away.

Sam comes at him first, leading with his right. Dean ducks and punches him hard in the midriff, hears the jolted _oof_ of air that comes out of his lungs. They step back from each other. Sam’s mouth is open and his chest heaves as he tries to catch his breath. Dean goes straight in again, trying to catch him off guard, but Sam’s expecting it and the next punch connects with Dean’s jaw. Dean rolls with it, comes back low again and manages to get in two quick, under-the-arm jabs to Sam’s kidney area.

Sam staggers back. “Not bad, Dean,” he says with grimaced admiration.

“Think of it as a down-payment. I owe you more than that.”

They circle each other warily, looking for weak spots. “Oh, you’re right about that. The way you just left me to go to your brother like I didn’t count for anything. You owe me plenty.” Sam’s left hook really does come out of nowhere. Dean’s cheek explodes with pain and blood fills his mouth. He chokes, leans over and lets it run out, spits the last of it out and checks his teeth with his tongue. Still there.

He straightens up again. “I didn’t fucking know they were going to come for you. I thought we had time.” He takes advantage of the moment Sam needs to process that by landing a straight, solid punch to his face that snaps his head back. Blood runs out of Sam’s nose when he lowers his head. He wipes it away with the back of his glove, smearing it across his cheek.

They glare at each other, breathing heavily. “I needed to see him just that one time. I came back for you, but you were gone. They caught me trying to trace you on Brian’s computer and just handed me over to Geneticore.”

Sam takes a couple of paces backwards, his eyes hard and disbelieving.

“I was locked up when the first co-ordinated strike happened. That’s how I got out. I’ve been looking for you ever since. And what about you, huh, Sam? Where the fuck have you been for the last four years?” Dean puts his head down, rushes forward and tackles Sam to the ground.

They roll over in a messy tangle until they hit one of the wooden posts and Sam uses his height and weight advantage to wrench Dean underneath him, legs locked over his, big hands pinning Dean’s arms to the ground. “So how did they know to find me at the tree house? I knew they were coming, Dean. I went there to wait for you. Why did you tell them? Were you that ashamed?”

Furious that Sam could even consider him capable of such a betrayal, Dean jerks his head forward and head-butts him. Sam rolls off and curls over, hands cradling his face, groaning with pain. Dean stands over him, fight instinct and anger encouraging him to kick Sam in the ribs. It might even be worth the damage it will do to his bare foot. “How could you think I would do that? It was probably your tracker chip, you idiot.”

Sam turns his head, “I disabled my tracker chip a long time before that, Dean.” He gets up, rubbing his nose with a pained expression. It doesn’t look broken to Dean. Sam drops his hand to his side. “Your mother was there. She told me it was you. She told me how disgusted you were that I was your brother’s clone, how you’d run away to find him.”

Dean slams Sam up against the wooden post. “And you believed her? I would have done anything for you, Sam. How could you even think I would do that?”

There’s so much anger and confusion in Sam’s expression. He isn’t hiding anything. His eyes dart around Dean’s face, linger on his mouth and another emotion flickers into life: desire. An expression of raw, exposed longing. Dean’s breath catches in his throat.

“Uh, Dean.” A tentative hand taps him on the shoulder. Dean whips around and Castiel holds his hands up to pacify him. “This is not really the place for what’s going on here.”

They look around them. A lot of the rebels have dispersed. The few that remain regard them with curiosity. There’s no sign of Dean’s dad.

“Your father has gone to bed,” Castiel informs him.

“He’s right,” Sam says, holding his hands out for Castiel to remove the gloves, “This is not the place.” He rips off the gloves after Castiel has loosened them before grabbing Dean’s wrists and doing the same for him. “C’mon.” He takes Dean’s arm and pulls him through a knot of men who watch them leave with smirking expressions. A couple of low whistles and catcalls follow them.

Sam lets go of Dean’s arm. He strides towards the tents and Dean follows him, watching the moonlight and shadow playing across his broad back.

Sam leads him to a tent. It’s slightly smaller than some of the others. There’s a single military cot, a table covered in books and something that looks like radio equipment. Sam goes over to a bucket on the floor next to the table, kneels and dunks his head in it. He stands up, water running down his shoulders and chest. He’s beautiful.

Dean starts to harden. He tries to surreptitiously adjust himself, but Sam’s eyes drop to watch the movement of his hand anyway. They remain on Dean’s crotch after he takes his hand away. Dean stands there, uncomfortable and turned on, arms hanging loosely at his sides. Sam’s eyes track upwards until he meets Dean’s gaze.

Dean watches a rivulet of water, pink with blood from Sam’s nose, run down his chest. He takes a deep breath. “I still want you, Sam. I don’t care if it’s wrong. I literally thought I was going to fucking die when I couldn’t find you.”

Two long strides and Sam is grabbing hold of him, big hands wrapped around Dean’s head, hard fingers on his jaw, angling his face so Sam can crush their mouths together. His tongue probes past Dean’s lips and ravages the inside of his mouth. Dean groans deep in his throat and wraps his arms around Sam’s waist, pulling them flush together. They still fit perfectly.

Sam pulls back, skin flushed and eyes bright. “I thought you hated me for what I was—your brother’s clone—and for what I wasn’t, that I would never actually _be_ him. I thought you were disgusted and ashamed, that you blamed me. Then I heard you were with someone and I tried to be happy for you. I did. But I wasn’t, Dean, I really wasn’t.”

“Jesus, Sam. I could never hate you.” Dean lifts his hand and wipes the end of Sam’s nose. “Your nose is bleeding again.”

Sam turns away, goes to the entrance of the tent and snorts the blood out of his nose, one nostril at a time, holding the other nostril closed with his finger. He picks up a threadbare towel hanging over the back of a chair at the table and wipes his face, briefly scrubs his wet hair and wipes his armpits. “You should know, I don’t consider breaking my nose foreplay, Dean.”

Dean grins. “I’m just glad to still have a full set of teeth, asshole. And don’t be such a baby, it’s not broken. When did you turn into…” He gestures with his hand to encompass Sam’s height and bulk.

“That first year in a labor camp started it.”

Dean goes cold. “I thought the labor camps were for hardcore dissidents.”

“They are.”

“Jesus, Sam. I’ve met guys from the camps.”

Sam nods. “Yeah, so you’ve heard what they were like. It’s where I met your dad. I wouldn’t be alive if he hadn’t looked out for me.”

It was fate then that Sam met his dad and was protected by him. It was fate that led Dean here and brought them together again. Dean lifts his hand and cups Sam’s cheek. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry that you had to go through that. I’m sorry I took you to my house that day. It was such a stupid, selfish, arrogant thing to do. I’m just—I’m so sorry for everything. If you’d never met me in the first place—”

Sam places his hand over Dean’s. “It wasn’t your fault. None of it was.” He takes Dean’s hand and presses a kiss to the center of his palm, then lets go quickly, like he didn’t mean to indulge himself in something that sentimental, his eyes darting to Dean’s face as he laughs self-consciously.

“Careful there, Sam. Somebody might think you’re going soft.”

Smirking, Sam takes Dean’s hand and presses it against his crotch. “Not soft, Dean.”

And he really isn’t. He’s not all the way hard though, either, so Dean remedies that by rubbing his hand over the bulge of his dick. Sam groans and pulls him in close, trapping Dean’s hand between their bodies. His mouth is hot. “You don’t know how many times I’ve thought about your mouth, about kissing you like this,” he mumbles against Dean’s lips.

Dean frees his hand and grips Sam’s hip, pulling him closer before inching his hand around and palming Sam’s ass. Their dicks rub against each other and both of them groan. “I want to fuck you,” Dean says, both his hands on Sam’s ass, kneading and squeezing, the friction against his erection making him breathless with want. “I want to forget everything else but you.”

“God, yes.” Sam frantically starts to undo the button of Dean’s pants. He rips down the zip and drops to his knees, wrenching the material down Dean’s legs so he can step out of them. Sam throws them aside and buries his face in Dean’s crotch, starts mouthing at his shaft, his breath hot and moist against Dean’s skin.

Dean shudders and makes a choked-off noise. He threads his fingers through Sam’s hair. Sam needs a haircut, he thinks idly. It’s not good having anything an enemy can grab hold of in close combat. It’s surprisingly soft, and Dean remembers thinking the same thing that first time he touched Sam’s hair all those years ago when he gave him a haircut. Sam’s scalp is warm against his fingers. Dean gives a quick tug and Sam opens his lips, taking Dean into his mouth. It’s hot and wet and soft, his tongue sliding against Dean’s flesh, and Dean thinks he might pass out from too much pleasure. His legs are shaking. Sam takes him all the way in and sucks hard. Dean throws his head back, eyes closed and lost in sensation, his hands in Sam’s hair and gently rocking his hips so his dick slides in and out of Sam’s mouth.

He’s getting close, the need for release cresting inside him. One more shallow thrust of his hips into all that delicious wet warmth and then he tries to pull away. Sam’s fingers tighten on his hips, holding him in place.

“Sam, you need to stop.”

But Sam doesn’t. The soft suction on Dean’s dick just gets harder and tighter.

“Sam, I’m going to—I can’t—”

Sam just holds on tighter, and Dean realizes Sam wants him to come in his mouth. That sort of short-circuits his brain briefly. He watches Sam’s face, his lowered lashes and the flush over the bridge of his nose and along his cheekbones, the taut stretch of his mouth around Dean’s dick.

“God, Sam, I’m so close. Fuck—” He digs his fingers into Sam’s shoulder, struggles to stay standing as his orgasm rushes through him, half curled over Sam, both hands gripping the hard muscle of his shoulders, his vision blurring and a long groan escaping his mouth.

Coming back to himself, Dean blinks and looks down. Sam is sitting back on his haunches, his hair drying in unruly tangles around his face. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and surges to his feet.

Hauling Dean in close and hungrily kissing him, Sam starts backing them up until Dean feels the edge of the table against his thighs. He’s dizzy with the salty smell and taste of his own release. Sam leans behind him and sweeps everything off the table in one quick, impatient gesture. Dean laughs and allows Sam to manhandle him onto the table, widening his legs to allow him to fit between them. Sam kisses him roughly, wet and messy, thrusting his tongue deep in Dean’s mouth, biting his lip too hard, then mouthing across his cheek to bite and suck at his earlobe, down his neck, his teeth sharp on the tendon there, lower, to suck hard on his pulse.

Dean’s head is thrown back, cradled in the palm of Sam’s hand, and he knows he’s moaning too loudly, but he just can’t care. He’s thought about this for such a long time that it feels surreal, like it can’t really be true. He can feel how hard Sam is through his pants. “You’re wearing too many clothes,” he grumbles, fiddling with the button of Sam’s pants. Sam bats his hand away and quickly strips the pants off. His thick cock curves up towards his stomach, hard and flushed. He stands close, his hands on Dean’s thighs, and Dean rubs his thumb over the head, through the sticky fluid at the end, lifts his hand to his mouth and tastes it, tongue flicking out and circling the pad of his thumb. Sam’s eyes darken and his nostrils flare as he breathes in deeply.

“What do you want me to do?” Dean asks, his voice low and rough. “Do you want my hand?” he wraps his hand around Sam’s dick and gives it a firm stroke. Sam groans and thrusts forward. Dean starts jerking him off, both of them watching him do it until Dean pauses and says, “Or do you want my mouth?” Sam looks up and Dean licks his lips in blatant invitation. Sam’s hands tighten on Dean’s thighs, fingers digging hard into the muscle. “Or do you want my ass, huh, Sam? Is that why you wanted me to come so quickly? So you could fuck me?”

Sam stares at him intently, his gaze so focused and filled with heat that it makes Dean shiver. “Yeah, that’s what I want. I want to bend you over this table so I can fuck you.”

Dean shivers again. “Is that because of what I said to you earlier about being more of a receiver? Trying to prove you can give it to me hard? You think I can’t take it?”

Sam suddenly pulls him off the table and flips him so he’s bent over it, his ass exposed. Sam has one hand on the back of his neck, holding him down and the other grips Dean’s hip. He leans forward and drapes himself over Dean’s back. “I don’t remember you being this talkative before,” he whispers in Dean’s ear.

Dean cranes over his shoulder. “You’re right. Less talking and more fucking. C’mon, Sam.”

Sam laughs. “But I do remember you being so impatient and bossy.” He presses a kiss to the side of Dean’s neck, one at the base of his skull, another halfway down his spine and another in the small of Dean’s back. Dean curls his fingers over the edge of the table and holds on tightly, waiting.

He didn’t think he could get hard again, but he does, slowly, when he feels Sam’s tongue at his entrance, circular licks and little, sharp thrusts into Dean’s body.

“Fuck,” Dean groans. Lights and colors swirl and flash behind his eyelids when he closes them. He digs his nails into the table.

“Stay there,” Sam instructs, getting to his feet and moving to the other side of the tent. Dean can hear him rummaging around for something. Then he’s back, something cold and wet on his fingers as he opens Dean up, kneeling behind him. He crooks his fingers and Dean jerks when he rubs against his prostate, clenching the edge of the table so hard he thinks he might break it.

Dean turns his head to the side. “I want to come with you inside me, and if you don’t get up here, that’s not going to happen.”

Sam laughs and gets to his feet. He grips Dean’s hips. “We’re going to have to work on your stamina.”

Dean’s response gets lost somewhere between his brain and his mouth when Sam starts inching his dick inside him. A low moan escapes Dean’s lips instead. It feels so good, so intense. Sweat breaks out across his skin. He’s hot and shivery and there’s an edge of pain and discomfort that makes the pleasure even sweeter. He can’t stop the broken, breathy sounds tumbling out of his mouth.

Sam leans forward and bites his shoulder. “Do you want the entire camp to know that I’m fucking you?”

“Don’t—don’t—care,” Dean chokes out and moans loudly when Sam reaches forward and takes hold of his dick. His brain can’t cope with rational thought and the avalanche of pleasure from the dual stimulation of Sam’s hand on him and Sam’s cock in his ass. Sam bites his shoulder again and thrusts harder and faster, his breath loud and harsh in Dean’s ear.

Dean’s orgasm racks through his body, leaving him limp and exhausted. Sam holds his hips tightly and thrusts into him once more before letting out a deep groan and pulsing inside him.

They lie like that, collapsed on the table for a couple of minutes, Sam pretty much crushing the breath from Dean’s lungs, before he lifts up and tentatively pulls out. Dean’s about to work up the energy to sit up when he feels Sam cleaning him up with the towel, wiping down the insides of his thighs, his balls and ass. Sam strokes a gentle hand down Dean’s back. “You okay?”

Dean lifts up and sits on the table, grimacing at the discomfort that causes. He grins when Sam raises his eyebrows and frowns in concern. “Yeah, Sam, I’m good.” Sam steps into the vee of Dean’s thighs and places his hands on Dean’s jaw, lifts his head so he can press slow, careful kisses to his mouth. Dean smiles into the kisses, and Sam’s lips curve in response.

Sam steps back. “I’m going to get some water.” He wraps the towel around his waist and picks up a bottle from the floor, giving Dean a small smile that heartbreakingly reminds Dean of his brother as he’d walked away from him that time.

Dean collapses on the folding military cot and sighs. He’s tired and satisfied and happy. It feels good.

Sam comes back and offers Dean the bottle of water. It’s cold and delicious. Dean didn’t realize how thirsty he was. Sam turns off the lamp hanging from the center of the tent and eases himself onto the cot next to Dean. It groans with their combined weight. “We’re going to have to sleep on the ground,” Dean says.

Sam makes a non-committal “mm-hmm” sound and lifts Dean’s arm so he can rest his head on Dean’s bicep. He’s on his side, leg flung over Dean’s and his arm over Dean’s chest. It’s warm and comforting and Dean sighs with contentment. Sam makes a similarly happy sighing sound. They lie in the dark, listening to the silence.

“What was he like?”

Dean doesn’t need to ask Sam who he’s talking about. “He was happy.”

Sam waits a few seconds before saying. “Good. That’s good.”

“He seemed kind, generous, sort of—I don’t know how to put it—I guess uncomplicated, maybe. And really smart, you know? He got into the training center in the capital.”

“Did you feel…”

Sam doesn’t need to finish that sentence either. “No, I didn’t feel the same way about him. I didn’t want him. It wasn’t there at all. And I really worried about it, you know?”

Sam nods against his shoulder.

“I wanted to tell him that I was his brother, but it seemed like such a selfish thing to do, like I’d only be doing it for my own sake. I didn’t want to ruin his happiness. He seemed to have his life all planned out. But, maybe if I’d told him, things would’ve been different and maybe he wouldn’t have been killed.”

Sam lifts his head. “You can’t think like that.”

“I know.”

Sam puts his head back down on Dean’s arm, and Dean pulls him in closer. “Do you remember that first time in the tree house when you tried to seduce me with that story about the alien chick with the forked tongue giving the intrepid hero a blowjob?”

Sam laughs, warm breath on Dean’s neck. “Technically, that wasn’t the first time. The first time, you tried to shoot me with an arrow as foreplay, ran me down in the forest, and then we wrestled until we both came in our pants.”

“That’s because you were driving me fucking nuts ignoring me all the time. I was just trying to get your attention.”

“I told you, Dean, you always had my attention.”

“Okay, but it’s not like you used to show it, Sam.”

There’s a long silence and Sam is still and stiff next to him. “It’s hard sometimes. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be feeling or how I’m supposed to react. Originals have all these expectations and I don’t always know how to meet them. I see your dad looking at me sometimes, the same way you used to, as if he expects me to say or do something, but I don’t know what it is. Luckily, I’m a good soldier, and this is a time and a place where it’s better not to feel too strongly.”

Dean lies there thinking about why this person next to him is it for him, probably always will be. Maybe it’s some kind of enduring perversity in his own nature, a desire for the impossible.

“It’s not like I don’t feel, though.”

“I know that. Of course you do.”

“And I know how I feel about you.”

Before Dean can respond to that, Sam continues, “Do you believe there’s something after this, when we die?”

A big white moth has found its way into the tent. It flutters and beats itself against the fabric of the roof. Scattered fragments of light break through the tiny pinprick holes in the tent and illuminate its aimless desire to escape. Dean watches its struggles. “I don’t know. My mom pretty much turned me off religion for good. I don’t think about it anymore.”

“What happened to her?”

“I don’t know.”

“I wonder about what happens afterwards. A lot. I wonder why I was given all these thoughts and feelings if I’m supposed to just function, you know? Just serve some kind of practical purpose. And then I’m just going to die, and what then?”

Dean snorts. “It’s called existential angst, Sam. It’s part of the human condition.”

Sam shifts and places his hand over Dean’s heart. “But am I human? In the way that you are? If there is something after this, after we die, what happens to the clones? If we don’t have souls, then is that just it.”

Dean makes a sound of irritation. “Oh come on, Sam. You don’t believe that bullshit about clones not having souls, do you? It’s a pile of crap.”

“We used to have to repeat this mantra every morning and every night at the institution.” Sam’s voice takes on an incantatory quality, “Help me to be obedient, to know my place, to serve my purpose without ego. I am a mirror reflection of my original. I do not exist for my own sake. I exist only to serve.”

“Jesus, it’s mind control, right? You know that. They needed the clones to be submissive, to not be individuals. But you’re your own person, Sam. Nobody will ever exist who is exactly like you.”

Sam laughs. “That’s very deep, Dean.”

“Don’t sound so surprised. I’m not just a pretty face.”

Sam laughs again and tweaks Dean’s nipple. “And humble too.”

Dean puts his hand over Sam’s and absently rubs the top of it. “Tell me about the institution. What was it like?”

Sam describes the routines, the constant fear, the punishments, the abuse from the guards and the supervisors. It breaks Dean’s heart, makes him angry and sad, and doubly committed to the fight to create a new world.

They talk until late into the night, catching up on each other’s lives.

The next morning Dean wakes to find Sam staring at him. He smiles and rubs his eyes. “It’s rude to stare at a person when they’re sleeping, Sam.”

“Can’t help it. I just can’t believe that you’re here with me.”

Dean ruffles Sam’s hair. It’s nice to be able to touch him so casually. “Well, get used to it, because I’m not going anywhere.” His stomach rumbles loudly. “I’m starving. You totally depleted my energy reserves last night, and I’m hurting everywhere.”

Sam gets up and starts dressing. “You’ll get used to it,” he says with a smirk and throws Dean’s clothes at him. “C’mon, we’d better hurry up if we’re going to get any breakfast.”

They dress and walk up to the cooking area of the camp. It’s hot and sunny, and the sky is clear and endlessly blue.

Reece, Castiel and Dean’s dad are sitting together at one of the tables. They watch them approach, all three of them wearing faint smiles.

“So I see you managed to deal with your issues last night,” his dad says when they sit down.

Reece laughs dirtily and looks unrepentant when Dean’s dad gives him an arched-eyebrow look. He downs the dregs of coffee in his enamel mug. “I hear you made quite an impression,” he says to Dean, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “There are very few men who can take Sam in the ring.”

“He didn’t take me at all,” Sam says dryly.

Feeling magnanimous, Dean responds, “We’re pretty evenly matched.”

Reece laughs. “Matched, yeah, that’s what I heard.”

“Stop that, Reece.” Dean’s dad gives Reece an irritated look, then looks at the two of them, eyes switching between them. “What if I have a problem with this?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Sam says instantly. “We don’t need anyone’s approval.”

Dean glances sideways at Sam. He’s looking straight across the table, not belligerent, just adamant and unblinking. Warmth and pride flood through Dean.

“You saying you’d abandon all this for him?”

“Yeah,” Sam responds, “that’s what I’m saying.”

Dean’s dad stands up and looks down at them. “I thought so. Get some breakfast in you. Both of you. We’ve got work to do.” He walks away towards the building with the satellite dish on the roof.

Reece stands up and grins at them. “Welcome to the family, Dean. We’re pretty dysfunctional and fucked-up, so I think you’ll fit right in. See you in the war room, boys.” He nods at Castiel, then turns and follows Dean’s dad.

Sam smiles at Dean. “Was that okay?”

Dean returns the smile. “Yeah, Sam, that was okay.”

“I’ll get you some breakfast.” Sam gets up and walks over to where a couple of guys are cooking on camping stoves.

Dean looks at Castiel. “You going to stay?”He asks the question even though he already knows the answer.

“I can’t, Dean. My place is with my original.”

Dean nods his head. “Yeah, I know. Thought I’d try, though. Who’s going to keep my ass out of trouble if you’re not around?”

“I believe your ass will be well taken care of by Sam, Dean.”

He says it so deadpan that it takes Dean a couple of seconds to get the innuendo. He snorts with laughter and smacks Castiel on the shoulder. “I don’t believe it. Cas’ sense of humor has finally rubbed off on you.”

“It is an unfortunate by-product of spending time with him.” Castiel looks at Sam talking to the guys cooking breakfast. He meets Dean’s eyes. “They are good men. Both of them. You’ve always hungered for something. I hope you will find it here.”

“Yeah, me too.”

The sun beats down. Wild and natural smells of freshly soaked earth and trees mix with the scents of breakfast. Castiel raises his head, eyes closed, briefly soaking up the sunshine.

Dean smiles at the simple physical pleasure on Castiel’s face. “I never thanked you for pulling me out of that hell-hole.”

Castiel lowers his head and starts shaking it, trying to negate the necessity of what Dean wants to say.

Dean continues anyway. “I’d given up. Thought it was over, that I was going to bleed to death in a muddy trench, just another body in a pile of them. And then there you were.”

“And I’ve never thanked you for all the times you saved my life. Nor have I thanked you for restoring my faith in original humanity. It doesn’t need to be said, Dean.”

“But it feels good, though, right? To actually say it.”

“Yes, I suppose it does.”

Dean nods and watches an ant crawling over his arm before flicking it away. “So you’re going to hitch a ride with the convoy leaving later today?”

“Yes, the camp is on their route.”

They stand and Castiel extends a hand towards Dean. Dean smiles at the formality of the gesture and at Castiel’s serious expression. Shaking Castiel’s hand, he says, “I’m going to miss you, Castiel.”

“Thank you, Dean.”

“This is where you say I’ll miss you too, Dean.”

“Oh. I’ll miss you too, Dean.”

Dean pulls Castiel into a hard hug. Grinning, he steps back and pats Castiel on the shoulder. “Don’t ever change.”

Castiel smiles and says, “I have no intention of it. I’ll see you again soon, Dean.” He walks away towards the tents without looking back.

Dean watches him, amused, sad and grateful that he got to know Castiel. It’s a chapter closing in his life. He looks over at Sam walking towards him with two plates in his hands. And the opening of a new one.

**The End: epilogue**

A civil war is a devastating chapter in the history of a society. Members of a single community, neighbors, turning on each other, changing into enemies can create long-lasting scars that take generations to heal. The civil war that raged for two years throughout the North American continent destroyed much of the social and organizational fabric. It was the purging of a corrupt system, and nothing would ever be the same again afterwards. A new age dawned with its own complications and challenges. For the men and women who fought for a new, fairer society, the sacrifices were worth it in the end.

THE END


End file.
